A pond’s surface has no up or down

I dug some large drawings out of storage to have a new look at them.  Old koi more scribbly than their more recent cousins.  These were made one fish removed from the real, abstractions formed of abstractions.  What can I say?  I like to scribble.  In these exercises in thought fish, it’s hard to identify the top of the picture, so it doesn’t strictly speaking have an “up.”  I made these somewhat like my old Aussie pal, the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, my teacher I never met — anyway, I sat on the floor and drew with the fishes spreading out horizontally (as fishes should).

And so I compared the scribbly with their firmer finned friends — all this taking place, of course, at my secret studio in the capital of the USA.