Stage #4, Colored Pencil on Graph Paper, 11.5 x 16.5in, 2014, Courtesy of Foley Gallery

I always judge a book by its cover. As an artist and visual thinker, it’s almost impossible not to. OK, it’s a flawed system, but I’m drawn to books with bright colors or old fashioned decorative patterns. I prefer illustrated covers to photographic ones because I find photos of real places or real people limiting to the imagination. I’m sure I’ve missed many good books over the years due to this prejudice, yet sometimes a beautiful cover marks the beginning of a long journey – an unanticipated obsession. In the summer of 2010, while waiting in line for a coffee at Rock City Coffee and Books in Rockland, ME, exactly this happened. My eyes went straight to a black and white illustrated cover of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the recently re-released Penguin edition that features the characters Merricat and Constance – two sisters whom I would come to love. Merricat is holding Jonas, her black cat. Behind them, an angry mob gathers. Stuck to the book was a little pink book Post-it note that read “just read the first paragraph…” My latte wasn’t ready yet, so I did.

Since reading Castle, I’ve read all of Jackson’s novels and all but a few of her short stories and her preoccupation with the personality of houses is constant. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Haunting of Hill House, and The Sundial, the home is as much a character as a setting. From the Haunting of Hill House:

“Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

As a lover of old houses, I connected immediately to the power Jackson bestows on domestic spaces. I see houses as vessels containing memories, injustices, fears, secrets, imperfections, doubts, dust and, of course, lots of knick-knacks. They are repositories for taste, both good and bad. Nervous energy ebbs and flows in a house, especially among the busy patterns of carpets, walls and upholsteries that serve as the backdrops of daily life. I find the inspiration for my drawings in this anxious order.

Shirley Jackson understood how attempts to impose order on the chaos of the mind all too often result in anxiety. People ask me all the time if it’s soothing to make my highly patterned drawings. The answer is no, not at all. In fact, I’m surprised when people imagine otherwise. Stress is the natural result of repetitive work. I’m not a machine, even though, sitting at my drawing table, I’m compelled to behave like one. There’s a fine line between beauty and monotony. When it comes to drawing patterns, I’m always treading that line.

“…the chair in which Elizabeth sat was…upholstered in a kind of cloudy orange, her feet lay on a carpet in which a scarlet key design ran in and out and around a geometric floral affair in green and brown, and the wallpaper, pervading and emphasizing the room, and somehow the Arrows, presented the inadvertent viewer with alternate squares of blue and green, relieved almost haphazardly by touches of black. There was nothing of harmony, nothing of humor…there was everything of compromise and yet, comfortably, a kind of deep security in the unmistakable realization that all this belonged without dispute to the Arrows, was unmovable and after a while almost tolerable, and was, beyond everything else, solid. Not even Aunt Morgen could deny the Arrows the reality of their living room…Mr. and Mrs. Arrow brought with them, and spread infectiously, an air of unfading wallpaper and practical carpeting, of ironclad and frequently unendurable mediocrity.”

For Jackson’s characters, their fear of empty space goes beyond the blank page, entering their psyche. That which is ordered, covered in pattern or filled with color refuses to allow for chaos, and leaves no room for uncertainty. Similarly, my recent series of drawings, Settings, references stage design as a way of evoking an interior environment. The idea is to create a confined space by filling it relentlessly with pattern and color, resulting in a mixture of beauty and claustrophobia. As Jackson’s characters’ so often illustrate, those who seek the most control are those most likely to lose it, an irony I deal with every day when I sit down in my studio to draw. But, that’s precisely where the urgency and the tension come from. Even more importantly, it’s where the attraction is because,

“Fear is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishment of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.” (The Haunting of Hill House)