Bikes

Yeah, bikes. There is a particular friction between subject, material and technique in this body of art that I worked over more than two decades

I was invited to show at University of Massachusetts, Lowell because of my bicycle drawings. Bicycle shadows never ceased to engage to me. For 22 years the forms pulled materials and techniques forward as the resulting drawings supported the opportunity to do so. I fielded questions about derailleurs at every exhibit for the more literal minded.

My first independent navigations of the world were on a bicycle. San Francisco offers unique cycling terrain. I lived on one of those 25-degree hills and had to manage a half mile ascent dragging a 40-pound Schwinn to the Presidio entrance. From there I could glide down a mile of eucalyptus forest to the dell… then roll a quarter mile up again, in a time before speed bumps. Later, I was a bicycle messenger in SF’s gritty punk culture of Pop Tarts, cigarettes, and contempt for the yuppie bankers who turned away from our sweaty selves in elevators. Even in New York I biked to work but stopped because I arrived furious, often trapped in the 18” between panel trucks on First Avenue.

I came to bicycles by way of their shadows.

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Once you start looking at shadows, or anything for that matter, it doesn’t really stop. Eventually my eye fell on an abused bike chained to a streetlamp, wheel bent in two. In shadow it is figurative: handle bars, wheels, pedals, and gear exchange have a direct relationship to my own hands and feet and seat. All that personal pedalling creates body memory that is called up seeing a bike. I hung a bike from my garage ceiling. The single bulb fell through the form, and spilled into near abstraction onto my page. It held all the complexity and specificity that can only be found in direct observation.

Joni Mitchell said, “No one ever said to van Gogh ‘Paint me Starry Night’ Again.’” It seems to be about what it’s like to have mobs of people scream “Circle Game” at you over and over and over again. At every concert. For decades. For her it seemed a musician’s problem. It happened to me too.

People ask me to make pieces again, and I do it to myself as well. When something works, I want to know why. After seeing Thomas Edison’s Dynamos in Miami Beach I made dynamos based on the idea of expanding energy. I made dozens of them. Broken in various ways—multiple pages or split and reversed or doubled, ordered and chaotic. All to see when the composition broke. Many of my compositions examine the relative appeal of chaos and order. Others use famous compositions like the hand of God from the Sistine Chapel or The Dying Gaul from the Parthenon pediment with bike wheels substituting for human elements. It’s a dumb idea. But it turned out smart work.I wanted to see if the power held. It did.

While the subject of this work may be bicycles, the center is always drawing and the long course between the beginning and full material realization. Included in this site, you will find an evolution of works from inception through multiple variations in idea, technology, and material between 2001 and 2021.

Viewers are often interested in the bicycle, while I am interested in making. When I am fully present in a long, smooth line, my hand blips with my heartbeat. I can see it in the finished piece. Just like the glide down the hill, it is a record.

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