My Single Line work began as a survival tactic. My anxiety has always been restless, tied to a kind of urgency I can only describe as be productive or die. Stillness rarely felt like rest, it felt like danger. In moments of boredom my body would surge with flight-or-flight panic, but instead of running, I reached for pen and paper. What began as distraction became ritual. I started to draw, not with any mastery or intention of representation, but with one continuous line.
The single line became a maze, a kind of mirror of the chaos inside my head. Its loops and turns echoed the confusion of anxious thought, the endless circling, the doubling back, the spiraling out. What might look like abstraction to others was, for me, a kind of transcription. My mind translated into form. The act of drawing calmed me because it gave shape to what felt uncontainable. Anxiety turned into image, and the line itself held it together.
Over time, I began to see this work as more than just coping. The single line became a symbol of myself. It is unbroken, moving forward even as it twists and tangles, adapting to whatever comes, much like I have had to do in life. Up close, it can look messy, incomplete, chaotic. But from a distance, there is a strange cohesion, as if the whole arc has been leading somewhere all along. I hope the same is true of me.
The dots scattered along the line serve as markers, moments where something interrupted the flow. Obstacles, opportunities, collisions, pauses. They break the rhythm only to remind me that disruption, too, is part of the journey. Each dot alters the movement of the line, adding dimension, shaping the form of what comes after. In this way, the line doesn’t just represent a path, it holds a story.
Although the work is two-dimensional, I initially see it in my mind as three-dimensional. I try to build that sense into the drawings, as if the image itself is not a line, but a clay figure. Even if the final form never achieves that illusion, the attempt matters. It reminds me that the mind always sees more than the hand can contain.
For me, the single line is both coping mechanism and philosophy. It embodies anxiety but also endurance. It is the visible thread of my inner life, drawn out into the world. And in following it across the page, I find a rare quiet, a way to be inside my chaos without being consumed by it.
Paintings are 18 x 24 Acrylic on Heavyweight Cold Pressed Watercolor Paper and available upon request.
