Artist Statement

ARTIST STATEMENT

Did you know our ancestors developed their sense of time by observing the horizon?

I love the horizon line.

Pulling a long mark straight across the page instantly divides space into sky and earth. My deft drawing hand jumps into realism where I create all figures and brings that inhabit various terrains.

Figure and landscape allow me to engage the seen and unseen parts of life. I attempt to express silence through situational and spatial ambiguity in order to reveal a deeper reality behind the surface of things.

I paint in oil on wood. Wood is the original surface for oil paints. Heavy, dense and uneven, it is a natural contrast to the buttery silk of oil.

In all my work, I begin with a small black and white sketch, working out the large shapes and finding the image therein. The story gives the composition, the composition the color, and the color decides the surface. After covering the gessoed, wooden panel with a layer of thin, dark paint, the process of wiping away paint begins. The light and dark areas remaining are the movement and the essence of the art. After a series of color studies, I mix the entire color palette. This can take an hour or two. The result is perfectly harmonious color relationships, like a musical chord. Then begins the painting of the panel, when and where I listen to the sound of the paint.

From singing and playing the piano to finger painting and making illuminated manuscripts, much of my early life was spent in solitary creativity which brought me great happiness. I have continued to try and live on such a manner, as lifestyle influences artistic choices.
By interrupting images through the smearing of paint or turning round objects into partially flat areas, I try to create bridges from one world to another, looking for completeness.

When I was in art school in Europe, I was especially inspired by the unearthly visual content exuding from the Venetian painter Giorgione. In the way the he combines worldliness and simplicity by placing strange figures into the Italian landscape, my narrative work combines academic expertise and finger-painting in conjunction with people, animals and trees talking to each other, an effort to wed the mystery of the inner and outer worlds.

It isn’t necessary to understand all of the content. Just standing in front of the work, or even next to it, is enough. The message is in the paint.

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