In my tessallation prints, “Footnote To Ghost Dog (1-4),” I’m playing with an accumulation of references and influences throughout all of my work, be it poetry, sketchbook or journal writing, paintings, what have you. The Ghost Dog, as a symbol, exist throughout the past year of my work. It was at first a head nod, a dip of respect and love to my recently dead dog. Bandit (my dog) would pop up throughout my sketchbooks or poetry and would just kind of live, be a reminder of death and life, a motif just for me, nothing serious.
Last March I was working on a poem by the name of “In-between Home Shapes;” it was a poem about how in my mid-twenties, a space in-between any kind of permanence, far from “figuring it out,” I feel transient, in-between no places that feel like home. In the poem I reference a Francis Bacon painting, a study he’d done of a photo Muybridge had taken of a dog in motion. In the painting the dog looks a bit ghostly, transient, at a place in-between places. In the poem I call it “a ghost-dog-thing.” This poem ended up becoming the titular poem of a chapbook I was working on, and since then, this poem has informed every poem I’ve written since. It was a turning point for me and my writing, and it so happened to be about a ghost-dog-thing. This print is simply a personal reflection of the accounts of Ghost Dogs throughout my work. The print was made on printer’s paper with ink, oil, watercolor and styrofoam stamps. In the image the stamp is imitating a ghosting, and back and fourth through solidity and not, being and not being. The palette is picked to evoke rust, something old and still aging.
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