Erickson creates his images using any technique that can help him achieve the sense of a thing becoming or eroding before our eyes. He may employ drawing, or monoprint, or painting. He combines techniques frequently: drawing on Mylar before creating a plate for printing, soaking and stretching a print in order to paint on it, or sketching an idea in wire and tar before capturing it in two dimensions. As Erickson makes an image, he creates an experience of a thing unique to that work of art. His marks engage the control of decades of training but also employ chance events of ink or paint. He intends his creative process to emulate the processes happening on the shore, along the road, or in the woods. Each piece is an experiment or an investigation and when it succeeds, the art is the record of the questions asked that day. Some of Erickson's works evoke columns of smoke, bubbles, or cairns of piled stone. In nature, smoke, stones, bubbles all bind together with complex physics. There is an order to the way the physical objects hang together. And as their order becomes apparent in Erickson's image, we can hover in the moment before the smoke will vanish, the bubble will burst or the stones will tumble. In each finished work of art, Erickson gives us something that can never be finished or something that is always becoming something else or something that will never change.
Seana Thir I, oil on paper, 6x4
Seana Thir II, monoprint, 8x6
Seana Thir III, oil on paper, 8x6
Seana Thir IV, oil on paper, 16x12
Natura XI, oil on panel, 94x60
Natura LXV, oil on panel, 96x94
Arch, oil on panel, 68x30
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