Statement
What I make in my art practice in Verplanck, NY are surviving artifacts; I consider them visual intuitions.
The hunches I pay attention to offer me a glimpse of who and what I am as a human being. The prompts for the work can arrive as a remnant of a dream or in a vase of flowers right in front of me.
‘Who Are These People’, ‘Hudson River - Hook Mountain’, ‘Flowers of Good and Evil’, ‘Music Makers' are all bodies of work that speak to both future and past themes. They have morphed and changed by my dissatisfaction about their insufficiencies and have been continued by the satisfaction of seeing them come alive.
Small and midsize paintings are starting to get bigger, asserting more presence. I employ a variety of materials such as oil, acrylic, pencil, yarn, recycled cigar boxes, paper, product wrappers, fabric remnants, and the plastic mesh found in the vegetable aisle of the supermarket. They make themselves from the diverse scraps I surround myself with.
The surfaces invite a caress of the hand. Their stories are personal although not completely understood or revealed. Their imperfection rubs up against fluency of representation and color. Their narratives desire space for the viewer's story.
More and more frequently repurposed materials float to the surface like textured warnings. The anxiety of life is there, the sorrow for brokenness, and gratitude for existence too, and a kind of faith found in the making.
I struggle to make objects which are beautiful by being themselves; and I’ve come to see that often this can change on any given day, week, or year. The fluidity of meanings' shapes are part of aliveness to me.
I ask myself many questions while I create these things - looking for a balance of confident ambiguity, trying to communicate something I’ve just stumbled upon, the thing I’ll always be looking for. The paintings contain an energetic movement of painted strokes and contrasting values. The verb searching is visualized.
Connections such as Vincent’s letters to Theo, Emily Carr’s forest cathedrals painted on package wrapping, and William Blake’s poetic voice are examples of what leads me to go further into my work.
My art practice looks for the Deeper Well. I’ve seen the pointers stenciled with soot on stone, in the handmade thing that fits in the palm of a hand, and in a painted prayer on a wall.
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