Laughin' & Talkin’: A Study in Translating Line into Space
Laughin' & Talkin': A Study in Translating Line into Space is a wall sculpture based on a 1964 drawing by Romare Bearden. Through sustained study, material experimentation, and processes of transformation, the work explores how the formal relationships within an image can move from one medium to another without becoming a literal copy. Rather than reproducing Bearden's drawing, the sculpture asks what can be carried across forms while preserving the spirit of gathering, conversation, joy, and collective presence that gave rise to the drawing.
an evolving project
Rather than documenting a finished work, this page follows the making of Laughin' & Talkin' as it develops. The sections below trace the conversations, experiments, and material decisions shaping the sculpture as I continue to refine it for its debut at the Petaluma Arts Center in January 2027.
learning from Bearden
Romare Bearden has been one of the most important influences on my creative practice for more than two decades. His work has shaped how I understand creativity itself. As a chef, writer, and artist, I return to Bearden because his work continually teaches me that creative practice grows from relationships, memory, improvisation, and community.
Like many people, I was first captivated by his extraordinary collages. But what has stayed with me most is the way he moved effortlessly across painting, cartoons, music, and literature. Bearden's approach to collage also shaped the way I thought about cooking and recipe writing. Like his compositions, my recipes often begin with familiar forms, classic dishes, staple ingredients, and flavor traditions from across the Black diaspora, then reconfigure them into something that honors those histories while creating new possibilities.
Throughout his career, Bearden returned to scenes of Black gathering: people making music, sharing meals, telling stories, working, laughing, and caring for one another. These were not incidental subjects but a sustained affirmation that everyday Black life is a site of profound creativity, abundance, memory, and cultural expression. His work does more than represent community; it embodies its rhythms. Like jazz, it moves through variation, repetition, and improvisation, allowing relationships to generate meaning.
Over the years, I have often found myself in conversation with Bearden. In the quiet moments of making, I have returned to his work as a source of guidance, asking questions that extend far beyond art.
Then, in December of 2025, it felt as though he spoke back.
the gifted drawing
Laughin' & Talkin': A Study in Translating Line into Space began with a gift.
Early in 2026, I was entrusted with an original 1964 drawing by Romare Bearden. He sketched it during a gathering in Harlem at the home of the abstract painter Joyce Cadoo. The drawing had been carefully preserved for decades before finding its way to me.
The gift carried particular significance because the person who entrusted me with it knew how deeply Bearden had shaped my understanding of creativity, something I had written about years earlier in one of my cookbooks. At the time, I was only beginning my studio practice, and receiving the drawing felt like a profound affirmation.
When I began my residency at the Eames Ranch, I stopped thinking about Bearden simply as an influence. I began thinking of the drawing as the beginning of a conversation.
That shift changed everything.
I stopped asking, How do I make work about Bearden?
I started asking, What happens if I make work with him?
I was not interested in reproducing the drawing. Instead, I approached it as something to study, learn from, and extend. I asked what might happen if its formal relationships, gestures, rhythms, and sense of conviviality could move into another medium without losing their vitality.
In this sense, the project became a collaboration across time. Bearden's drawing established the questions; my role was not to replicate his answers but to continue the conversation through wood, process, and form. The resulting wall sculpture is less an interpretation of a single image than a response to an enduring act of artistic generosity. It recognizes Black cultural production as something sustained through exchange, study, and the continual passing of knowledge from one generation to the next.
"I stopped asking, How do I make work about Bearden?
I started asking, What happens if I make work with him?"
drawing as instruction
When I was invited to Ranch Studios Artist Residency, I began redrawing Romare Bearden's figures at full scale each time I entered the studio. Working at that size forced me to slow down and study the drawing more closely.
Rather than treating Bearden's drawing as an image to reproduce, I approached it as a set of instructions. I wasn't trying to copy it. I wanted to understand the confidence of the line, its rhythm, its economy, and the decisions it carried. With each iteration, I became more attentive to how a curve generated movement, how negative space shaped a figure, and how a seemingly simple line could hold humor, presence, and energy.
Over time, the exercise became a conversation. I realized that the drawing's vitality did not reside in its exact contours but in the relationships it established between bodies, space, and gesture. My attention shifted from preserving every mark to understanding the formal relationships that gave the work its life.
Eventually, one question took over: How do you translate line into space?
The resulting wall sculpture is not a literal translation but a response shaped by sustained observation, material experimentation, and transformation. Fidelity to the original drawing was never the objective. The goal was to discover what could survive the movement from drawing into sculpture.
This approach parallels What the Black Belt Carries. There, a nineteenth-century cotton production map became an instruction for building a sculptural painting rather than an image to replicate. Here, Bearden's drawing became an instruction for constructing space. In both projects, historical and artistic sources serve as generative frameworks, inviting new forms to emerge while carrying forward the ideas embedded within them.
listening with Bearden
Throughout the residency, I returned again and again to Romare Bearden Revealed, an album by the Branford Marsalis Quartet, while redrawing and carving the figures. I found myself returning most often to the track "Laughin' and Talkin' (With Higg)" because I imagined it evoking the atmosphere of the 1964 Harlem gathering where Romare Bearden sketched the drawing. Whether or not the music belonged to that moment mattered less than the space it created in my studio. It became a way of inhabiting the drawing rather than simply observing it.
Listening to the album day after day slowed my attention and reinforced the improvisational qualities I admired in Bearden's work. Like jazz, the sculpture developed through repetition, variation, and conversation. Each drawing, carving, and revision became another pass through the same ideas, revealing new possibilities with every iteration.
The phrase "Laughin' and Talkin'" came to capture not only the spirit of Bearden's drawing but also the process of making the sculpture itself. It eventually became the work's title. More than a soundtrack, the music became another collaborator in the studio, reminding me that Bearden's work has always been inseparable from the rhythms, improvisation, and communal spirit of Black musical traditions.
building the figures
Once I understood how I wanted to approach the drawing conceptually, I turned to the practical question of construction. How could an expressive line become a durable sculptural form while retaining its sense of movement?
After weeks of redrawing the figures at full scale, I created a digital version that isolated only the marks essential to the composition. Those files became laser-cut templates, allowing each shape to be separated and studied as an individual sculptural element before being translated into wood.
Rather than treating the laser cutter as a substitute for handwork, I used it as a guide. Each template was paired with a carefully selected piece of hardwood whose grain, color, and character could contribute to the final composition. The templates were then traced onto the wood, rough-cut on the bandsaw, and are now being refined on the router before carving, sanding, and surface treatments begin.
Although the sculpture remains in progress, this stage has already clarified the relationship between precision and intuition. The digital files establish the geometry of the drawing, while each piece of wood introduces its own material qualities and subtle variations. As the work continues to develop, every cut and refinement becomes part of a larger process of translating line into sculptural form.
