I found myself fascinated with the Japanese art of Kintsugi: the repair of broken pottery with gold or silver in a way that emphasizes, rather than hides, the past damage. More broadly, the aesthetic called “wabi-sabi” is a world-view centered on recognizing the beauty in the imperfect, the impermanent, and the incomplete. This is in stark contrast to the Greek fascination with balanced perception – the belief that there is a single ideal of flawlessness to be achieved – which as so profoundly influenced Western Civilization.
In this series, I explore the beauty in brokenness. The unseen splendor of a ruined city. The serenity that is born of age and hard experience. The ephemeral delight in a flower that blooms for a day and is then gone forever. Things misshapen and decrepit, but rich in character. The new growth that arises from injured roots.
I am so weary of the pretense that we are perfect, and the expectation of unachievable perfection. We are all broken, asymmetric, suffering, and impermanent. We are all beautiful fellow pilgrims learning from the past and learning from our pain. Even the classical masterworks of architecture and sculpture are now crumbling and in ruins – becoming something more by the passage of years. They become lovely places of serenity.
I hope viewers come away from my art with a new appreciation for the little flaws all around them – and inside them – that impart depth of character and replace blandness with a sweet and piquant savor.
Where the building decays, plants take root. Cracks let the light in. It’s okay to be broken, imperfect, impermanent. There is Beauty in the Breakdown.
The lotus is well deserved as a beloved symbol with many meanings. It blooms in the most unlikely of places such as the mud of murky river water; a lovely delicate flower tenaciously growing in the muck! I like to think of it as a lesson from what I call God--though you may call it The Universe, Allah, Buddha, or something else--that we can take what we have and beautify it; we can start exactly where we are and go from there, and it is enough! In fact, the contrast of rising from adversity is stunning. It is a marvel to witness. It is glorious!
Each trio in this series consists of three paintings of the same still-life subject.
The first is painted in a classical, realistic style.
For the second, I take an impressionistic approach, deepening my familiarity with the subject but being less concerned with detail.
The third painting is expressionistic, where I try to capture the experiential essence of the subject, with little concern for objective reality.
These mixed-media paintings were inspired by a sequence of dreams. In this series, I explore those dream images, as well as a variety of media and artistic methods. Each painting includes tea as its primary pigment, but other media are included such as encaustic, intaglio, ink, found objects, and watercolors.
It can be daunting at times to enter into a pure white unblemished canvas. At times like these I begin by leaning on the words of masters like Tennyson, who easily inspires me with the dense imagery of his poems. I fill the whole canvas with words. The words may or may not be visible on the finished piece. It doesn't matter. The end result will be words transformed into emotions, energy, color, and pigment. Great poetry has a tendency to change us.
Alfred Tennyson's poetry has always felt to me just like a painting, only he used glorious pigments of words assembled together. The words are imbued with meaning that arouses all the senses. The interesting thing about poetry is that words may mean something completely different for each of us depending on our perspective. And perspective is ever changing and erratic.
For each of these paintings, the process starts with a stanza of Tennyson's poetry, which I write over and over across the canvas in every direction. Then come the many layers of paint. I cover the whole canvas many times, sometimes digging back down to expose a previous layer, but it is all infused and bound together with the rich emotions Tennyson's poetry evokes in me. At times I use a towel or a brush, but much of the time I am touching the paint, digging for treasure, searching for something beautiful to unearth. I paint with my brush. I paint with my fingernails. I paint with Tennyson.
Most of these pieces are square, but for some I deviated from that pattern.
