I believe the overarching stories of our lives are best expressed via scratchboard.

 

Scratchboard is nothing more than using any and every tool you have at your disposal to etch small lines of light in to the darkness. From a distance, it’s a seamless work of art with a variety of highlights, mid-tones and shadows. But if you slow down and take a closer look, you’ll see the whole story… the truth. Simplified. That truth being that all of our lives consist of lines we make every day. No grey, no in-between, just miniscule lines that begin to take shape. Line after line. Layer after layer. Scratch after scratch. No matter how small they seem, these lines, layers and things we create along the way add to the much bigger picture. Sometimes beautiful. Sometimes painful. Often times there’s a duality where beauty and pain reside within the same story. And the balancing scale between the two can be skewed by a simple matter of perspective.

 

But it’s up us to define those images, lives and our culture by choosing where to create the light. Not the dark. That’s when scratchboard, and our stories begin to take shape.