pencil on paper with gold leaf 37"x58"

A trip to Ocean City off season resulted in a myriad of photos taken of the seagulls up close as they flocked to us repeatedly thinking they were going to be fed. In the cold, and as a snowstorm blew in from the water, I noticed that many were missing feet and wondered why. I wondered how they managed on the ground, and even in the water without the ability to paddle...did the cold do this to them?

Back in the studio the birds just seemed like an interesting subject to draw as I haven’t drawn many animals. I found the drawing session(s) painful and hard; making the birds fly was difficult for me but the image progressed into a noisy group of moving wings in search of a "listener" to hear it. Grabbing a photo I had just taken of my mother in profile, I drew her left ear off-center in the drawing changing the dynamic of the page in a way difficult to describe. Working further, I decided that to understand a gull you had to look at something that was not a gull, so I pulled out my Field Guides and found images of other types of creatures in flight: I found vultures and humming birds, bats and butterflies. We project negative/positive connotations on animals; bats are bad but butterflies are good and vultures are frightening but seagulls are liberating…and yet of course, all are creatures having a part to play in an ecosystem. In the living reality of the drawing, they all had a part to play in a metaphysical system, and at some point I decided there was something transcendentally holy about the ear and added the gold, making an icon of sorts out of it (but not understanding whose ear it was). With the advent of “holy” or “mystical” I realized I needed something physically and temporally human. Reaching for my book on dissection I found a photo of a plaster cast made from the human inner ear (it looked surprisingly like a Georgia O’Keeffe sculpture). It was designed beautifully. I added a line drawing of it in the upper right hand corner.

I let this drawing sit for a long time and then when Larry Scott gave me a show at XandO’s, decided to exhibit it (untitled). A woman with a small child in hand came up to me at the opening and asked me what the drawing was “about”.

I hesitated and replied: “I think…it’s about prayer”.

The woman looked horrified and whisked the child away. I mean she RUSHED the child away and left the show.

A year later I saw a documentary on Seville where they process with statues from the churches on their shoulders and on carts through the streets during Lent. The interviewer asked a local woman: “How do you feel when you see the Blessed Mother being carried throughout your streets?” She replied: “Oh! We LOVE to see our Mother being carried through the streets. She knows us and we know her. She hears all our good things and all our bad things; she listens to us!”

I returned to the studio and looked at the drawing and understood: This was Mary. This was "My Mother’s Ear".