ALPHABET SERIES (2000)
As an artist and writer, I have embraced connections between language, human life and the animate landscape for many years. These connections are explored in the “Alphabet”—a piece that I created in 1999 as a component of language based works. The “Alphabet” made its public debut at the 2000 Northwest BookFest in Seattle, and has since appeared in other installations at the Everett Center for the Arts and Atelier 31 Gallery. The “Alphabet” is now privately owned.
The “Alphabet” features twenty-six one foot square oil-on-wood panels that depict my interpretations of the perceptual origins of our alphabet. Rich in earth tones and surface texture, the panels are painted in ways that echo early human efforts at writing; thus, many of the marks are incised. However, this “Alphabet” is not an imitation of any font style or graphic mark; rather each letter playfully expresses organic origins of our language. Every letter is, in fact, an individual painting in its own right.
As mentioned, I chose the alphabet as a format through which I could explore the primal underpinnings of depicting letters. These depictions (dating back to the Phoenician alphabet) have intrigued me and I began an arduous study of such themes in 1998 which led to further research of Egyptian hieroglyphics and the history of “signs.” Research has revealed, for instance, that the letter “M” is derived from the Egyptian symbol for water—thus giving rise to words such as marine and marina. The letter “O”—originally a symbol for an eye—offers the foundation for words such as optical and ocular. Of course there are many other examples too numerous to be mentioned here.
