This photo collage is a visual response to the work of Peter Karklin included in the University of Chicago Press catalog accompanying an exhibition of his work at the DePaul Art Museum, 2012.

The German-born, Chicago-based Latvian artist Peter Karklins creates small, pencil-and-paper drawings that capture the processes and energies just below the surface of all human life. The complexity of his organic forms is matched by the artist’s meticulous recording of the times and circumstances of the creation of each image on its reverse, providing viewers with added insight into these rich images. Brief essays by an eclectic and distinguished group of scholars deploy a wide range of theoretical approaches—phenomenological, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, iconographical, historical, and musicological—to interpret Karklins’s unusual images and artistic practices.

“The Nature Drawings of Peter Karklins,” edited by Sean D. Kirkland, University of Chicago Press. 2012