The world that comes to us through the senses is fluid, ever changing, with each moment of seeing unique. No matter how staid or decisive the resulting painting appears, the act of painting from direct observation is one of improvisation. One chooses from among fleeting moments, relationships, and sensations, knitting them together to fabricate a congruent, assembled, invented experience. My hope is to honor the particularity of objects, spaces, and people, while at the same time to make them a vital component in the abstract structure of the painting.
The essentials of painting continue to intrigue me: the interplay between structure and meaning; the tension between surface and space/illusion/plasticity; the ability of a paint stroke to simultaneously be a concrete material substance and signifier. (As the painter Rosemarie Beck put it, “I am now convinced that if the anguish of paradox is not somewhere felt – the paradox of a patch of paint being also a hand or an apple – we are still hungry; there is not enough food for the mind.”)
While I often include still life elements in interior paintings, my current still life series envisions a Lilliputian world, a small landscape of houses and objects existing inside a human scale house. I include objects that feel inherently animated, stand-ins for the human figure. The little toy man, falling in various ways and echoed in the reproductions of masterworks, brings an opportunity for the viewer to create connotations, and for implied stories.
I find the subject of the figure in the interior unceasingly engaging: an immediate narrative is present. The interior itself is potent: lived-in spaces imply the people who inhabit them. I work from intimates, rather than using hired models, out of a need to feel empathy between person and space, and to be an involved party, not a voyeur. The figures are often reading; it gives them a logical reason for being in the space, an implied inner life, and, since they are not paid models, keeps them occupied while posing! I am interested in how the person occupies a room, how the figure echoes other visual rhythms, or creates a contrast to the geometry of the space. I respond to complicated spaces, painting a room looking into another room, or an interior that opens onto the outdoors. As I make the painting, I create paths to navigate the two dimensional and illusionistic constructs. I am interested in the challenges presented in trying to articulate spaces that cannot be taken in from one static point of view, so that systems of measurement break down as I try to translate the perceptual experience of the three-dimensional world to the limitation of a two-dimensional rectangle.
