Huston Ripley

Artist Statement:

From many years of drawing and painting, I have developed a personal idiom depicting such things as fertility, growth, and death. The imagery suggests various iconographies and conveys the spirit or idea of transcendence. The process of creating these works has enabled me to express symbolically Eros, terror, peace, and other aspects of humanity by using universal shapes and structures found within the pantheon of the unconscious.

In recent years I have focused on drawing. I use a fine point pen and mending tissue, which is thin and translucent, but strong. For small drawings, I use one sheet folded. For larger ones, I stack and fold so that there are twelve or sixteen layers of tissue in each drawing. I draw on the top layer only, allowing the ink to bleed through to the layers below to produce an osmotic image. Because the paper is so thin, one is able to look through the top layers into the drawing itself.