BEAN

Bean—this is a new drawing I just made.  I guess my work is kind of surrealistic, especially my drawings.  It depicts a landscape of geometric structures like a high rise with beans in them or maybe it’s producing beans or holding beans.  It’s sort of like a pod with beans.  The bean has been a favorite image of mine for many years and there are several sculptures of beans throughout my work.  The bean is full of promise as a shape.  It’s a simple shape, mostly convex, but a little bit of concave.  It’s got a shape that’s on its way to do something else.  It’s a shape that looks motivated to become two shapes--to bifurcate.  It has a middle, a side,  a front and a back  It’s a shape that represents genesis, the shape of beginning, the shape of the seed, the shape of the very first embryo—we were all beans to begin with.  I love the pun, the “human being” and the “human bean.”  I’ve made a lot of those images with the bean, full of promise and potential, primordial and simple.