The Secret Life of Grubs

This is a series of drawings I made in 2013. The drawings are of grubs and insects, transforming, hiding, and emerging from underground. Some of the grubs are safe, some are in danger—there are monsters lurking in some of the drawings. There are flowers and bees and feeding and resting. There is aggression and attack and there is safety and containment.

The drawings are all made with ballpoint pen on individual pages of lined notebook paper cut from a notebook. As soon as I finished a drawing, I numbered it, put it in a folder, and then immediately cut the next piece of paper and began to draw again. I did not look back at or review the drawings during the four month period I was working. Each drawing took between six – thirteen hours to make, depending on the complexity of the individual design. The drawings have a real physical presence, the paper distorted and reshaped by the weight of the pen—they resemble dry fall leaves.

Each drawing is 7-1/2” by 9-3/4”. Ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper.