Christopher Spinelli

The source material for the Continuous Wave drawings is text. I take personal letters and emails and key their text into Morse Code translators I find on the Web. I then copy the dot and dash sequences onto sheets of paper, transforming the language into abstract pattern. When the paper surface is nearly covered, I add paint and coffee to modify and seal sections of the drawing. Moving between predetermined goals and improvised gestures, I sometimes set out to create recognizable forms—a waveform, a line graph, a head—forms that appear to grow out of the dense tightly compressed markings. Other times, I’m more provisional and let the drawing develop as a piece of free uncensored writing would: quickly and with little editing, giving all marks—the good and the bad—a place on the page.