like to paint quietly.

I have known for a long time that there is something to consider about a space layered with color, however opaque, however transparent, which connotes emotion.

 

My paintings are responses to single ideas connected to the divisions on canvas as images.  I began creating images as a child on any available surface including walls, concrete, dirt, and paper.  Years later as a university student of Fine Art, I found oil paint as a medium and the visual world as I knew it expanded.  Now I usually study a word, phrase or name, its context, meaning and underlying social connotations.  This study creates a web of connections, woven of people and place; intellectual, spiritual and physical experiences.  Some of the subtle references I use in my work are drawn from childhood memories of northern California cliffs and shores, high mountain desert hikes, and earth tones from various traditional color combinations from the northern renaissance.  The time I spent walking the mountain roads of Haiti, the valleys of Ecuadorian jungles, and forgotten towns of post-communist Europe after my undergraduate experience gave me more visual material as well as ways to expand this web of connections and deepen my interest in creating work based on simple visual symbols to convey my ideas about the realities of the world we live in.  Now as a graduate student about to complete my degree, I see art as a very individual process, that when thoughtfully considered, hopefully adds to the conversation about the human experience and accompanying emotions.

 

As a matter of taste and quality, I prefer linen but also work in canvas, using a variety of techniques with homemade damar varnish and distilled turpentine.  The paintings are often a complex layering process of glazed on lead white traditionally gessoed surfaces.  The texture emerges from the base layers rather than the paint layers.  I prefer to stretch my own surfaces to create works of unique sizes.  This handmade process is very important to the overall quality of my pieces.

 

Why are there no figures but geometry in my present work?  Non-representational images are naturally dichotomous because they set free the preconceived semi-permanent set of impressions we place on representational images and yet complicate the web of connected ideas and spontaneous impressions produced in the immediacy of viewing art.  I like the freedom presented to the viewer through a minimalist framework.  However, I am also deeply committed to drawing and the concept of the line, an will occasionally include words or images within the geometric framework.  Stylistically I see my work evolving to include more underlying drawing in the future.

 

Because I paint in a non-representational style, it is impossible for me to completely verbally describe the emotions and energies that accompany my work and it is my hope that viewers will feel to appreciate the work in an individual internal context rather than in a verbal context.