About My Work

Drawing, in one form or another, is foundational for most of my artwork. As an art student, many years ago, figure drawing was one of my primary concentrations. The in-depth practice of improvising from the model established, for me, a basic vocabulary of forms that I have internalized and continuously used throughout my work, no matter its degree of abstraction. The human presence, whether figure, or face offers a psychological connection that I don’t necessarily find in pure abstraction. In my artwork many lines, edges and shapes have their origin in the human form. I am interested in exploring the relationships among recognizable, figurative elements and that which is non-objective and invented. The resulting ambiguity between what the viewer can identify and what may be open to interpretation provides access to possible directions for me to take a work-in-progress and for the viewer to legitimately interpret without the necessity of a definitive explanation.

My Process: an Example

For me, art-making involves a kind of gradual accretion. Elements are added- a wash, a gesture, lines forming figures overlap and make shapes, colors are introduced- an opening gambit. The new work is set aside as possible directions are considered. Other pieces intervene, asking to be worked on, problems crying out, solutions to contemplate, doubt and hesitation to obliterate. Eventually I return to the started piece, a painting. A structure emerges then disappears, but not completely. When something is added something else is lost. A plan is established and then realized, but it falls short of expectations. The painting is abandoned, temporarily forgotten, like the weekend before last. Time passes. Then the painting, still lacking an identity, makes an unexpected re-appearance. The conversation with it re-commences with new perspectives, alive with possibility, a willingness to take risks. There’s a plunge, an abandonment of fear, psychic windows and doors are thrown open- anything is possible. The plan unfolds in the moment. Faces and figures surface, unbidden, but there’s no pre-existing narrative for them to enter into, only the non-verbal hub-bub of colors, lines and shapes in the midst of changing and rearranging. With caresses of my paintbrush on the canvas, I will the piece to come to life, a complete entity, with its own character, virtues and flaws, dragging its past into the present. The traces of its making- layers of half-buried images, palimpsests and painterly flotsam. The moments of adding to and revising, along the way, create the visual density that, to me, suggests my experience of being swept along in time’s concurrent flow, through simultaneous landscapes of routine existence superimposed with the mental nexus of electronic media and the internal narrative that populates my thoughts. The four dimensional map of the unfolding day is splashed, dabbed, glazed and scraped onto two. This is both my painting process and a way of living.