I needed time to understand what I was doing. For years I’ve made improvised drawings, often with live music where musicians reacted to what I was drawing and I drew what the musicians were playing. Sometimes there were dancers, too. Bit by bit, I started to understand the musicality of the lines, shapes, planes, and color patches—how they interact and shape a final impression. A drawing, just like any other artwork, is never truly static; it moves in the minds of the spectators. It dissolves, compacts, and reshapes itself with the help of the memory system we all develop in our own way.

The Emergence series delves into that. Shapes, marks, gestures, and directions—they all come together to shape the final drawing. They conjure a world bigger than their own. Every painting and drawing has its own ghosts, spirits within; some linger on the surface, others are hidden deep. But they all emerge one way or another during the process of creation.

The characteristic of one line may feel malign on its own in the early stages of the making process, but it may pop up as a cruel or bad-tempered line, not giving up its territory, later in the drawing process. The Emergence series is the accumulation of many years of working on my own visual vocabulary.