Histories from Rust and Mold...

It's a very strange thing to learn that you've lost everything, or nearly everything, in any particular area of your life. Of course it comes with the feelings that you'd expect, anger and sadness in their various swings....but there is so much else that goes practically unseen, working beneath the surface.
It's been a little over a year since I officially "moved" to Denver...I say it that way because I have done what I think a lot of Denver transplants did, that is, visit here and then decided to stay. It's been near two years since I left Brooklyn....you can probably see the gap there. When I left Brooklyn I had no clear idea where it was that I would end up....I just knew at that time that New York was not going to work. So, my possessions went into storage.
It's been a little over a year since I officially lost the majority of my possessions to water damage while in storage....including most of my portfolio. Fifteen years of work gone in a weekend, and realized with one phone call.

For the better part of this year, I have really been unable to bring myself to draw in any real capacity. If I had to come up with an explanation, the best one would have to be that maybe I had this feeling of starting over, which is daunting. I spent most of the time writing, which is all I had left seeing as how all my writing DID make it through the disaster unscathed. The little drawing that I did do just felt forced and with results that I have to say I wasn't particularly fond of.

A few months ago I decided to finally organize my studio space. While going through things and figuring out where to put them I came across two drawings in progress that I forgot that I had hidden in a box of paper (that I was luck enough to have survive the water damage). The reason that I'm bringing any of this up at all is because of the fact that I have been in a drawing frenzy for the past few weeks, and I owe it to that discovery.
One of those drawings is the one I just completed for the Collaboration Show, the other is this mixed media drawing:

...which was the lone survivor of a short series of gestural drawings I was doing.

All of this brought the idea of history into my mind, and the conclusion that I'm just not satisfied with accepting that some past work is gone forever....which brings me to the current work portion of the promised posts. Below are some scans of deceased work that I have pulled up because I plan to re-draw them. I struggled with the idea of redoing past work, but like I said, I'm just not ready to chalk these up as casualties of war just yet, and feel the need to resurrect them.
Also, I intend to redo these large scale, around the same size as The Fork Communion that I just completed. Of course, I don't expect these to be finished any time soon, but I will try to post progress reports.
I'm also thinking about finishing the above drawing and maybe restarting that series again. I haven't decided as of yet, my mind seems to be all over the place lately (the writing within this blog should be a good indication of that fact).

I'm going to need more coffee.....