This series of works has been in development for the past two years. It began during a period of travel, Romania was to be my first stop. On my journey there I created a few idle sketches overlaying words to create textures. Amused and intrigued by the concept of using text as texture, the first images, I dubbed "word textures", were created. These early works explored the image as something contrasting with the language used to describe it and these works were highly conceptual.

 

Later I discovered that I had in fact been working on an ancient style of drawing known as the Calligram. To offer some perspective on the existence of calligrams, Romans created calligrams thousands of years ago and today they are commonly found in Arabic Calligraphy.

 

More recently, I relocated to China and began to study Chinese calligraphy. This was not so I could write Chinese characters, but was with the intention of learning about brushstroke aesthetics. It was to be this theory of aesthetics that I'd turn on my own brushwork.