I love the challenge of painting, its resistance and generosity. I approach my work through surface, color and light. I determine a color to paint and then the way I want to apply it. I try to come up with color that is emotional, associative. I try to use colors that refer to substances and are evocative of experience. The application is both additive and subtractive. I am concerned with creating movement and the development of space in the painting. The work proceeds this way through many, many layers of translucent color and activity. I am interested in developing the illusion of a deep, luminous, fluid and primordial space.
The vocabulary for my painting is evocative of nature; biology rendered in a way that simulates various highly technological means of imaging that we now use to access hidden micro and macroscopic worlds. I am fascinated with light and the way an object can contain light, an inner glow contained beneath the surface of things. I want my paintings to contain a tension or dialectic that goes on between things, a dance of opposites. For example, the play of the surface and literalness of the paint, declaring itself against the illusion of deep space.
This new work also deals with the idea of process as a subject matter itself. The paintings have a concern with the experience of growth and decay, the state of change. The work creates a realm in which entities concurrently appear to be coming into being, coalescing, as well as decaying, degrading or deteriorating. It is a theatre of progression and transformation. The work embodies the suspense of something about to happen, that experience of being “on the verge,” nascent forms in the midst of generation. We are witnessing a cycle, some process, undetermined whether it is beginning or ending.
