Manuscript Series
This series came from a desire to recreate a drawing I made when I was at sea both as an artist and in my life.
My cousin Sherry Miller, who had always been a champion of my work, bought the original Manuscript drawing. She died in 2013. When I made that first drawing I had not imagined it to be a series. I was trying to break away from a fairly rigid format and found myself making small marks across the page, from left to right. I surrounded each small mark with gold, and the result was reminiscent of an illuminated page. Years later when I was missing my cousin, and wishing I had that drawing, I tried to recreate it. None of the drawings after that first drawing is quite the same, but I enjoyed the spontaneous quality of making tiny marks that looked as though they could be read. They became their own language, joining my love of text and visual art.
The Manuscript Word series within this series is a narrative of a traumatic event in my life, in 2015. I was told I had to keep it a secret. I included text that looks like Hebrew letters but is actually a simple code I learned when I was in grade school. Making these drawings was a way of putting the story in public, in a quiet way. It was a cathartic process that helped me to begin to heal.