Micah Wren-Gray

Well, Why Then?
fancy pen & Bic blue on paper
13 7/8 x 10 5/8 in.

I have studied art in quite a few places, never with any overwhelming response or result. I found when I was young that it was just the value of making the thing that was the reason I made art, and did not feel any real inclination to show my work or feel that there was much of a reason to do so – I don’t think that’s true anymore. I found life to be quite a bit more empty than I expected it, as though all the resounding “there is nothing” in my work was still somehow ever hopeful that a later self would know and understand what I did not then. To some degree the intrinsic value of the work is the bottom line but I found it to be too quiet a place – making things in the corner of a room and never hearing the voices of those around you.

In the last few years I have become a mother and I did not understand how my voice would change, how my vision would change. This drawing is not especially representative of that but, rather, a working out of old spirits in order to come to my more recent questions and figure out how I can still be this questioning person and artist when I now feel that society says I should have so many more of the answers. Art is something I have to do, and even if it is only the scribbling of cheap pens on paper, somehow throwing this out into the void seems, at least for now, as good a response as any.

© Micah Wren-Gray