Ball games, card games: boys play and men play and play and play and keep playing. Through these games rules are taught, endurance is taught, scoring is taught.

And the lessons deepen to model behavior and goals and notions of power and might as virtue. Boxing, hunting and fishing unite men in a shared vision of dominance. Meanwhile the girls are playing, too. Except they are playing with dolls. They are playing dress-up and looking to the mirror for the transformative magic of the ultimate role of bride. Then there follow the relationships: friendships, intimacies and the inherent games, mind games.

These paintings and drawings are open expanses, like the blank screen across which an image flickers and in that moment something beyond the image is illuminated. Some flash of recognition of the meaning of the experience is scratched across the surface. The drawing is loose, a line in constant movement, a puddle of color to anchor, to give weight to a thought ready to fly off, nearly forgotten as the day passes and the activity is lost to the accumulation of the mundane. But some trace is left on the surface, the page, and the fragmentary remnant serves to conjure up the sense of the whole.

The pencil or charcoal or crayon or brush play with the eye. It is a game of conjuring: just enough there there to evoke the game.