ARTIST STATEMENT

In paint and mixed media, I construct works of invented spaces and narrative populated by references to landscape and its inhabitants--the iconic, cultural, and the everyday.


I am interested in making paintings built upon abstract chunks and gestures of paint in which spaces are active, charged fields. Paintings in which gesture can act as protagonist and color can change climate and create a sense of “condition”, felt and perceived.


Works in the series “Field Notes” are conceived as fragments of space/time/experience interacting within a broader field. The central “characters” in most are derived from artificial animal forms based upon life size molded, hydraulic targets documented at an abandoned archery range--or concrete statuary-- lost and found within an animated world. The “Passage” paintings, pandemic fueled, are new explorations of child/hood/scapes. I am drawn to work with the ambiguous, idiosyncratic nature of the subjects, teasing out implications of broader narrative from this alphabet of fragments, formal to funky.


I live and work on a riverbank, on a fragile coastline of powerful forces: blazing sun and saturated color, deterioration and generation, the randomly abandoned, roots that don’t grow deep but spread and intertwine, the flatness, space, and always a horizon line—and humans. I work with visual parallels in creating paintings.


It is the experience of invoked qualities, the sense of memory, loss, longing, fantasy, illusion--and the perception of internal experience--that I hope to make tangible.