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A dog-eared, well-thumbed copy of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is always within reach in my studio, and the many smudges and spots of ink that mark its pages are evidence of how often I refer to it.  For the past five years it has given me raw material for a growing body of work, and each time I pick it up, Melville's visually evocative words strike a volatile spark in my imagination.

I have a long history with this tale, beginning with a very early memory of the 1956 John Huston film being the first movie I saw in a theater with my parents.  I first read the book at age 12, and probably skipped over everything that didn't contribute directly to the narrative action.  At seventeen,  I read it again, and made it my subject for an American Lit paper as a senior in high school.  In my twenties I picked it up again and found it a wondrous escape from the mundane life of a stay-at-home mom.  However, it wasn't  until I came to the book on the other side of raising a family, and in the midst of an intense period of growth as a visual artist,  that Melville's words began to resonate for me in a whole new way. In 2004, while finishing course work for a BFA in printmaking, I read Moby-Dick for the fourth time, and began a series of drawings, paintings and prints in response.   Finding such a rich source of content -- at the same time that I was developing my own individual method of working -- was a real breakthrough for me.  In its collage-like complexity, the novel parallels the physical processes of printmaking, in which an image is built up through overlapping layers of line and tone and texture. The marks and multiple layers change each other as they are combined, and unexpected things happen; the printmaking process itself can be seen as a metaphor for the way time and experiences – and great books -- change and mark our lives.

Captain Ahab, speaking to Starbuck, exhorted his first mate to look beyond the surface impression of things and see “the little lower layer.” It is that lower layer, very present in Melville’s writing, that I try to touch in this body of work – seeking the transition from the particular to the universal; from the singular character to human nature itself; from the tale of the Pequod’s crew to the story of all humanity as one crew, inextricably bound up with each other and with the sea of living things on which we sail.