Jerry Iverson

My art has been much influenced by the materials, balance and grace of Asian calligraphy. I don’t know what the characters mean, but I love how they look.

I use many layers of sumi ink, paper and rabbit skin glue to build a distressed, uneven texture. Torn and broken black lines create a tense, awkward balance.

To examine an idea thoroughly, I like to work in series. One idea, over and over again:

Windows

My wife, Linda, has been a landscape designer in this area for many years. Through her collaboration with local architects, she collected a large stack of architectural plans and blueprints. As the projects were completed and the landscapes matured, many of the paper designs were discarded. I snatched them up. I love the paper, the black lines, and their angles. But, in these plans, everything is so formal and perfect — and that’s not the way the world is. The Windows series uses these large architectural plans as a backdrop, as a window, into a broken, disconnected, and imperfect world.