I do few drawings anymore, but I executed this one as the first in what I hope to be a conceptual triptych about metaphysics. Prior to the production of this piece, I was blessed to have Terry Penner, professor emeritus of philosophy at UW-Madison, admit me into his final graduate seminar on Plato before retiring. The seminar focused on interpreting Plato's metaphysical theory in relation to modern language theory and how analytical philosophy is carried out in general. This seminar, and Penner's lectures overall, had a tremendous impact on how I view philosophy and art, and served as foundational springboards from which I have embarked on many conceptual works. For anyone who has studied Plato, you certainly have come across his Theory of Forms, a metaphysics in which beyond the particulars in the world there exist abstract objects, or "forms." These are thought to be more "real" than material objects, and exist behind and beyond physical objects, regardless of them. Nominalists, on the other hand, refuse to admit of any such entities, insisting all there is to what we call, for example, "orange," is all the particular orange things. We just use the term as a convention of language, but it refers to nothing. I am not advocating nominalism here, but it just happens to be the first in the series of drawings I choose to work on. I gathered orange drawing media - a pencil, cray-pa, pastel, pen, marker, and crayon to make the drawing. Since language is instrumental in the concept, I insisted on using products specifically labeled "orange." A number was assigned to each drawing media, and a dice was rolled to determine which item would be used to draw a freehand vertical line. The process was repeated until the page was filled. Through this piece, I wanted to reference this metaphysical debate and propose to the viewer to inquire whether each of these markings are a particular orange, or whether this can facilitate our seeing through the individual marks to what might be referred to as "orange itself." 25x38".
