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| Dust Road Night Village, Acrylic on mat board, 40 x 32 in. |
I choose objects to paint based on their symbolic potential,
activating subconscious association so that the reality alluded to by the painting is influenced by the viewer's own experiences.
Any human figure must be equivocal enough to discourage obvious interpretation—obscured by darkness, facing away from
us, distorted by water or simply incomplete—and yet invite empathy by leaving room for the viewer’s free projection
upon it. I like the disequilibrium of feeling something before knowing its name, and the shock of recognition upon seeing
oneself in the other.
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| Ways No Longer Traveled, Acrylic on mat board, 35 ½ x 24 in. |
Unless they are detrimental to the composition, I allow my process marks to remain. In the ground areas they suggest atmospheric
remnants of days past or energy struggling to resolve itself into something concrete, while on a figure, they read like scars
left by experience. Elsewhere they become the subtext of whatever murky narrative the picture has begun to inspire, and they
signify psychic and sensory disturbances that compete with "reality" for our attention: accumulated emotion, checked impulses,
suppressed thoughts, persistent memory, ambient sound, peripheral movement, dreams. I am looking for the sensation of wandering
about in a schism between two or more forceful realities.
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| Waiting, Acrylic on mat board, 32 x 40 in. |
I proceed with the expectation that, in allowing the river to take me where it will, I will create a work that is about myself.
It is not an intent but an inevitability, in the way that disguised handwriting will nonetheless reveal the writer’s
identity. I cannot elude the feeling that I have become separated from some spiritual homeland, a birthright as it were. A
certain wistfulness about this state pervades much of my work, as though painting is a shamanistic act whose purpose is my
reintegration with that realm. But I hope that, just as a change of light reveals new color, each work is ultimately given
significance and renewal by spiritual and emotional flux in the life of the viewer.
Personal Information:
Born March 7, 1954, Eugene Oregon. Lives and works in New York City.
Gradutated University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1977, Bachelor of Science
in Art
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