from Robert:
Making proceeds for me by serial invention, from piece to piece and across time. The means are collage and drawing, picture as writing, scaled intimate and to the hand. Essentially I want to write an art, to make of the visual a kind of text, and have it be as well a poor art, assembled from scraps. Material is essential; scuffings carry history, which wanders throughout. In one of her journal pages from The Book of Saul, Ruth Greisman, both eponymous and real aunt and the artist of the Book, wrote: "Art an ongoing limit, open to wind. I make it thru me, draughty R." Her formulation holds throughout the Book and also across the wider field. But the Book defines the territory. It is composed of fragments and encompasses a rotation of styles, is a biography of her (our) making and consists of a pile of pictures in and across time. Artifacts of a life, both hers and mine; the refuse and rejecta of days, "open to wind."

Other figures besides Ruth run through the work. Her brother Saul, for example (the two together make up my initials, and also carry my mother's), and the recurring Droon, a maker of drawings ("Droon is to Draw as Draw is to Coleslaw"), and previously Welch, a professor, and Eckstein-Sousa, and others. Personas, altar egos, others, not myself. Every figure reveals aspects of the total form, which is open and green. Art, as creation and as sign of primary Imagination, is not objects but a state, a kind of fluid. It is revelation of a sort that both objects and figures are the excess of. Nor is it happenstance that the face, the portrait, the animal, fantastic or otherwise, is central. Everything starts from there. Children always begin with it: two eyes, a mouth, animal or human - a round, split and trussed and multiplied and confused. The portrait is also artifact, collage of time, a token and remnant. In her work Ruth is always speaking to herself: "To collage night, against and for stays." The wind is what comes through, barely glued down, sign of what maker here.