Lived-in spaces imply the people who inhabit them. Objects carry layers of meaning. I seek the intersection of the language of making and the readable illusionistic image, finding the line I can walk between retaining the tension of becoming, coalescing, and the completed and resolved.
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 making them a vital component in the abstract structure of the painting. The source of my paintings is usually the stuff of my daily life, encountered, collected, or arranged. The dream is, through the alchemy of the language of paint, to spin straw into something more precious.
It is the essentials of painting that 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.”)
