Artist’s Statement
My work exists in the ambiguous zone between abstraction and representation, exploring how we negotiate our relationship with worlds, both physical and conceptual, that are comprised a succession of images unfolding over time. The hope is to create a visual experience that is suggestive enough to engender a conversation with the viewer while leaving ample space for the viewer’s unique experience, knowledge, and sentiments to become a part of that conversation.
My sources of inspiration are varied and include synesthetic responses to both music and literature, as well as the forms of other organisms that inhabit our planet, all of which I think of in the context of the work of other artists, past and present, and the writings of certain philosophers and theorists.
Compositions often begin, whether drawings, prints, or paintings, with imagery that is triggered by listening to a piece of music or reading the words in a novel or poem. My imagination is also frequently taken by the varied natural imagery of the natural world, often drawn to the strange and beautiful creatures found in deep or black water dives, or those wriggling around on a slide under a microscope.
Once these images start to take physical form on paper or canvas then the work takes on a life and direction of its own, and the question becomes how to respond to it: to the colors, forms, and movements already drawn or painted, in a way to that builds upon my initial thinking and vision.
As the work grows over time, other influences seep in, for example: the thinking of Henri Bergson about a conscious being’s perception of the accumulation of time; the cacophony of voices and images in contemporary visual arts; the thinking and images of other artists and movements.
In the end, my objective is to create a visual experience that is both challenging and inviting, rife with inferences but welcoming to the viewer’s unique experience, addresses the concepts of beauty and joy while not forfeiting a certain level of mystery.
A Note on Titles: In order to create titles that were conceptually consistent with my objective of creating imagery that is an open yet suggestive abstract matrix, and in a nod to the Dadaists, I developed a rubric to pull random syllables from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which is a remarkable piece of literature in which words create an open yet suggestive matrix.