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Artist Statement

Flood Drawings in Five Chapters:

River Village City Storm Deluge

Drawings of water began a decade ago, well before the Deluge Paintings.

When I returned briefly to living by the sea, a decade ago, I took water as my subject. I had too many ideas, so I chose to not labor over slow paintings but to draw every day whatever showed up. I got up, had a cup of coffee, and drew.

Now I will draw poems, I thought, later I will paint novels.

Images appeared, new to my work. An emotional charge was at the core of every drawing. Bedrock was a life of observation: memories of rowing my boat as a child, swimming in the summer, looking down from high bridges. Rowboats appear, and chairs – the active and observant artist, and little houses – families. Only later did I guess what these meant.

A calligraphic line flowed down the page in a vertical format like that of Northern Song scrolls. I called forth abundant water unlike the recent severe drought in Texas when Bastrop burned and three of my trees died. I drew San Francisco rising above the fog; among the sea cliffs of Bolinas; in Washington, the imperial city; in an ecovillage in Maine; and in the contemplative space of College Station.

I drew stories. Then I found the narrative. After a year and a half, I spread out the work like storyboard sketches and found a narrative in five chapters, from River, to Villages on the rivers, to Cities separating from river and nature, to Flood – the age we were in when I made the drawings, and to final, future Deluge, the age we are in now. These drawings are a wordless graphic novel moving from Dr. Seuss villages to a safe harbor hard to find.

A selection of the 300 drawings from the FLOOD series is included here. There are 66 drawings in the book FLOOD, and 46 drawings in the show FLOOD.

Two videos about the Flood exhibition and drawings:

FLOOD: Artist Mary Ciani or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WmQV2xn3oM

Walkthrough of the Flood exhibition

https://www.pechakucha.com/presentations/art-of-warning-making-of-the-flood-drawings

Wide-ranging Pechakucha talk about the Flood drawings

"An extraordinary vision by a master of technique and insight."

– David Woodcock,

Professor of Architecture

Texas A&M University

"Mary Ciani's series of Flood drawings reads as elegy, eulogy, prophecy and lament for humanity and its troubled and troubling relationship with the natural world."

– Stephen Caffey

Professor of Art History

Texas A&M University