The title Paper Trails refers to both my process of leaving a trail of torn newspapers and magazines in the wake of searching for interesting found images and text and my artistic life in drawing. While I have, after all these years, a body of work that spans 40 years and that has evolved stylistically and technically, as importantly is the flotsam of that development. Looking through those boxes is like looking through years of history. Naturally the images chart a change in fashion, design, and cultural but subtler things as well: it documents a change in what pre-occupied us as a society. The eighties are filled with South American coups and civil wars; the nineties the Balkans and power lunches; the aught’s, disasters, terrorism. Those are just the surfaces, the raw edges of the material in my boxes. And because it is a collection sprung from my own artistic and personal needs, it is a skewed view. Those images that resonated with me and that generated new ideas were/are like a personal Rorschach test. From life but sublimated through de-contextualization, abreaction and re-configuration. When I dig into those boxes I dig into an archeology of history and the personal. Success is measured when the product of those paper trails end up as drawing.