MockingBird

My new drawing, Mockingbird, is featured in a new online show called Moments of Illumination presented by WOWxWOW. The collector’s preview is now online. This graphite, 12” x 9” piece was completed in late November on 140lb Arches hotpress paper.

I love the title of this show. One of my favourite books is Illuminations, A Bestiary by Rosamund Purcell and Stephen Jay Gould. The book invites us to speculate on the strange and wondrous in new ways through its choice of subject and juxtaposition while leaving room for mystery.

There is no intended connection between the book and the show, but both examine how illumination is as much about what is not revealed as what is, shining a light on what was previously hidden. Mystery, in other words. Another book, Maud Casey’s brilliant The Art of Mystery, ends with the following,

It might be said of writing and reading that they are a variety of religious experience. Certainly they are a way of moving through, and being in relation to, the world. Mystery is the key ingredient. It allows us to experience the intangible and is a means of bridging the finite and the infinite. There is an aspect of infinity to mystery—an eternal becoming. That mystical susceptibility [William] James speaks of—that willingness to reside in, and make room for, mystery—is at the heart of making art.

Mockingbird speaks to the uncertainty of knowledge. Those things which we believe we understand whose meaning may turn out to be at best, ambiguous.

I hope you will take the time to check out the show. If you are interested in other works of mine, please visit my online shop.

I appreciate your interest and support in 2025. I am working on a number of exciting projects for 2026. Happy holidays!

• Richard