One-Trick Pony is an ongoing effort to fully explore the visual and narrative possibilities of a single, specific drawing—a failed sketch that I made more than 20 years ago of several overlapping animal and organic forms. I use this drawing as a template, repeating, reconfiguring, and minimally elaborating its elements to make intuitive drawings, paintings, and collages. These pictures play with ideas of science and natural history, folklore and myth, art and craft, the mechanics and conventions of image-making, and my own curiosities and fears about animals and natural phenomena.

This effort started modestly, as a way to get out of a creative block. Feeling dissatisfied with my attempts to make new, good pictures, I refocused my attention on finding ways to rehabilitate an old, bad one. With the recurring images and subject matter serving as a throughline, I could experiment with media and approaches while at the same time building a cohesive, expansive body of work. At the most basic level the project was, and still is, an open-ended game of discovery.

But at its best, the game approaches something like alchemy. A drawing that I made half a lifetime ago—in fewer than five minutes, with no larger ambition or goal in mind, and which I only narrowly avoided throwing away in the years since—now feels invaluable. It has become the key to an entire world of pictures and stories, one that is bounded only by the limits of my imagination and skills.