My work creates imaginary worlds from a synthesis of images, patterns, and textures. I draw from diverse sources and respond to the abundance of ideas and images in the media, my travels, and my daily surroundings. I also reference a legacy of fine art and cultural imagery (e.g., in one painting, Jean Arp sculptures are shown heaped in a stone pile in the woods). Some of this material is digital, yet I insist on working primarily in an analog, tactile format. It is through the crafting of my reef-like, built-up, layered, almost archeological surfaces, that my content and narrative emerge.
I begin working within familiar traditions and through an additive and subtractive process, my imagery grows into a vertical garden with intertwined organic shapes and lines. Sometimes an object has a dual function: the wings of a butterfly become a pair of lungs. Unexpected changes in scale topple the natural order of things: a segment of ginger becomes a striated landscape. I also manipulate the pictorial space, breaking from typical compositions by shifting planes so that they fluctuate between flat wallpaper-like space and 3D space. I use pattern and color to give my paintings a unity that contradicts the incongruous juxtapositions and unusual contexts. By combining disparate objects, I create structural problems, and through my struggle to solve them I arrive at innovative and surprising compositions. Objects are jumbled and strewn, in seeming chaos, but everything is placed with careful consideration.
There is a focus on painterly expression and craft, yet threaded through my work are themes of human interaction with the natural world; an exploration of what we discard and what we collect; and a child's loss of innocence. Sometimes commentary finds its way in (e.g., a Fabergé egg in a business suit depicted amidst a tangle of opulence and decay, the metaphor of a rabbit hole for the chaos of current politics and the pandemic). All these elements and influences are placed into the context of my own life and evolve into stories, either personal or imagined, sometimes with references to folklore and fairytales. However, I do not consider myself to be part of the conventional narrative art tradition. I leave these stories open ended and ambiguous, in spite of providing so much visual detail.
I begin working within familiar traditions and through an additive and subtractive process, my imagery grows into a vertical garden with intertwined organic shapes and lines. Sometimes an object has a dual function: the wings of a butterfly become a pair of lungs. Unexpected changes in scale topple the natural order of things: a segment of ginger becomes a striated landscape. I also manipulate the pictorial space, breaking from typical compositions by shifting planes so that they fluctuate between flat wallpaper-like space and 3D space. I use pattern and color to give my paintings a unity that contradicts the incongruous juxtapositions and unusual contexts. By combining disparate objects, I create structural problems, and through my struggle to solve them I arrive at innovative and surprising compositions. Objects are jumbled and strewn, in seeming chaos, but everything is placed with careful consideration.
There is a focus on painterly expression and craft, yet threaded through my work are themes of human interaction with the natural world; an exploration of what we discard and what we collect; and a child's loss of innocence. Sometimes commentary finds its way in (e.g., a Fabergé egg in a business suit depicted amidst a tangle of opulence and decay, the metaphor of a rabbit hole for the chaos of current politics and the pandemic). All these elements and influences are placed into the context of my own life and evolve into stories, either personal or imagined, sometimes with references to folklore and fairytales. However, I do not consider myself to be part of the conventional narrative art tradition. I leave these stories open ended and ambiguous, in spite of providing so much visual detail.