Circumscribed was the name I gave a series of drawings I completed over about 18 months from 1985-1987. Circumscribed was a term I had picked up from reading way too much Ezra Pound the previous years. 

“Man is—the sensitive physical part of him—a mechanism . . . rather like an electric appliance, switches, wires, etc. Chemically speaking, he is ut credo, a few buckets of water, tied up in a complicated sort of fig-leaf. As to his consciousness, the consciousness of some seems to rest, or to have its center more properly, in what the Greek psychologists called the phantastikon. Their minds are, that is, circumvolved about them like soap-bubbles reflecting sundry patches of the macrocosmos. And with certain others their consciousness is “germinal.” Their thoughts are in them as the thought of the tree is in the seed, or in the grass, or grain, or the blossom. And these minds are the more poetic.”

The germinal consciousness thing didn’t really interest me; but the soap bubble idea did. At the time I had been considering how raw visual stimuli - the images on the soap bubble - register as interior visual experience. Every bit of 2 D information on our retina is as fully present as any other; yet we somehow manage to sort what is important. Our focus becomes the vehicle for an interior visual syntax. This interior is what I was referring to with the term circumscribed. It was an awful title that only a person who reads too much could think up. Essentially the goal was to find a way to represent interior focus (reading, sleeping, dreaming, being on the phone) through compositions within a fully realized visual setting. “We all suffer from our point of view,” was one of my catch phrases. This series was an attempt to show that.

#1: Building is a bit different from the others. The way the simple composition broke down into pattern appealed. And after just having finishing a three year graphic novel project I wanted to keep it simple. The source photo was taken during a summer sunset walk in my neighborhood and the way that the intense fields of color marked the pattern also appealed. In fact I made a color version with Dr. Marten’s and ink before the B&W. It seems hard to believe now, but there had a moment at the beginning of this sequence when I considered working in color. After all the antique thermos red of Katie Christensen’s sunglasses in the subject photo that became Outing REALLY popped… But color was to come later.