An Artist Statement by Jeff Stratford

“After teaching art to children I decided to focus my artistic efforts on making an all ages illustrated story about not losing the fearlessness and experimental creativity that the youngest artists I encountered had so much of. For ten years i have been trying to draw in a way that is both improvisational and illustrative. But the combination of these drawing styles has been difficult because landscapes and creatures aren't easily improvised into a coherent scene, let alone a story.

The improvising is important to me for a few reasons. One is that it lends to accidents happening between marks and layers occurring, and these accidents are necessary to recreate the haphazardly weathered constituents of the world. This melding of order and chaos I wanted/want to bring to my drawing is found everywhere around us.

Trees have a fundamental order that grows and adjust to the stimuli of the changing world around it.  Improvisational drawing leads to layers and layers of imperfect tries  necessary to capture  the randomness and order interplay of a fire or a cloud or a face. Or a crack in a sidewalk.

Secondly, it is important to me because improvising is fun and allows room for discovery. At first, in this effort, the only thing i could do to create a drawing of creatures interacting in a land was to collage my narrativeless-patterned drawings on the computer, allowing me the ability to add and subtract as much as i pleased, until i found a face or scene that pleased me. But collaging had limitations  in conveying a cohesive composition.

So from what i learned from collaging, like flowers or rough compositions or creatures, I took as starting points and began drawing right onto paper. And that is what I've been doing and trying to learn to do for the past seven years, draw pictures for a storybook.”