A well-educated and art-savvy person came to my studio once and reviewed the work he saw on the walls.

At the time, the art on the walls was the Unique Series and one of the Two Large Drawings, Overlapping Branches. He commented that many of the “technical aspects” he was familiar with, because he had practiced them himself. And his interest in the tightness of the design of all the pieces was less than his wanting to see an image of complete disarray fall into a well-designed format.

Complete disarray to him looked like this:

which is a pen-testing sheet of paper, not intended as art, hanging on my studio wall, because I like it, too.

I was a bit resistant to his view of things…but I listened.

Weeks later I realized how his words influenced me. I had also practiced every technique of drawing and design he detected in the work for eons, but was undertaking the challenge of how they blended together in revivifying ways. The application of all I knew and the gathering of parts from the past intermixed and told stories of the history of my work.

I ran out of gas with the two large drawings. Each one took months to execute. I was so pleased with them. And took deep breaths afterward they were completed.

A few weeks went by and the memory of what the visitor had said started penetrating my thoughts about new art to do.

I had two 40 x 30 inch pieces of cream-colored paper which I had mistakenly coated with distilled water to size them. That sizing did not affect the paper like I thought it would, so I decided to work on these two pieces of drawing paper, and, by doing so, flatten them.

I started the first drawing at the bottom:

And built up from there:

The top half of part 1 of This Is The Story became an effort to grasp the individual shapes and textures of the leaves which are visible in the partial photos of them that I glued to the paper. Those drawings themselves became so abstracted that I drew them without thinking about how much they looked like what was portrayed in the photos. Ideas about the environment where I had planted the plant I cut the leaves from began to penetrate the repeated drawings. And I could not leave behind ‘lines’ which are the entire basis of my work. The configurations of lines evoked sky, waterfalls, rivers and ponds.

This Is The Story, part 2, 2026 is a darker, sadder version of the visual aspects of part 1.

Perhaps I felt weighed down by the idea that I couldn’t create complete disorder formally. That process was not in my nature. In my nature though, was the desire to color in shapes. So I did that. And it worked out pretty well. To complement the shapes, I chose to bring two tracings of the stencil of the leaves I had been using for the last several months ‘above water’ to end their life on paper.

In celadon blue, above the waves to the surface, unobscured.

copyright 2026 Lyn Horton