Drawing came first. It is there in everything I make.  I remember sitting on my Grandfather’s lap as he drew pictures for me when I was 2 years old, transfixed by the magic of watching images appear from pencil on paper.  As a child I drew with chalk on the sidewalks as if through pictures I could possess the things I couldn’t have in real life, like the pony I begged my urban parents for.  I spent countless hours training my eye and hand and countless hours trying to unlearn this mastery. Drawing was my ticket to a scholarship to college and my entry into my life as an artist.  I found I could conjure the whole physical world and also have access to my interior self. Drawing is my way in and my way out. It is the means to explore and invent various realities.  It helps me communicate ideas I don’t know I have with people I would otherwise never know. I use it as a tool and it is the thing I make with the tool.  I abandon drawing for actual physical space and find I am drawing with light and shadow. The models I make are actually 3 dimensional drawings.  My large sculptures start with drawing, but employ digital technology, laser cutters, and often large cranes for construction and installation.  In a lifetime I have sketched, calibrated, conjured, scribbled, rendered, encoded, uncovered, controlled, recorded, and wallowed.  I find myself working into and out of ideas that I have always held and the drawings are traces of moments in time when my thoughts were caught just having emerged into physicality.  The works in this exhibition act like the crumbs left by Hansel and Gretel but happily they define a path leading deeper and deeper into the woods.

Linda Fleming

Benicia, CA

March 14, 2012