I think of painting as a dynamic process, expressing energy through the coupling of opposites. The raw canvas is both filled and completely empty. Akin to dreaming, I begin with an image in mind but am not clear how it will manifest. I do not derive my imagery from sleeping dreams but from my eyes, imagination, memory, as well as photography, historical references and chance. I pursue a dynamic interaction between an intuitive  images, a sensual and physical handling of paint, and the spirit or accident of the moment.

 

 

Although stylistically I incorporate representation, paradoxically, I approach the canvas abstractly and employ gesture founded in Abstract Expressionism. I throw paint at the canvas and sculpt the surface using painting knives, nails, pins, bottle brushes, gold leaf plastic, anything that is lying around. Into the surface I incorporate paper collage, feathers, beans, tacks, sticks, glass and more. My subject matter includes th e figure (invented, remembered and/or quoted) as well as still life of paper, textiles, flora and fauna, food, weapons and toys. I work whatever my mood, and each piece combines the intentional with the accidental, the textured layers forming what becomes the body and flesh of the painting.

 

 

I am interested in complex story telling using cultural  myths and histories that reach back into our collective and personal pasts. Figures and still life figures evolve as open ended metaphors for concepts and environments that are themselves also metaphors, and therefore fold - like fabric, time, or paint - back in on themselves. Like a poem, a painting is a surface. The depth is in the surface (oddly). It sort of dawns on you - like the way one remembers a dream sometimes, in fragments that float up all through the day, assembling themselves oddly, disturbingly...