ARTIST STATEMENT

“A picture’s worth a thousand words.”  As a visual artist my greatest aspiration has always been to make my art speak or work in this way.  It is my hope that those thousand words might cross boundaries of understanding between the viewer and myself and that my work might potentially speak differently to each one.  What my current work speaks to is the mythological and mystical aspects of the paintings artists create. 

The subject of the mythological is always, by definition, about more than its obvious content.  It calls on the viewer’s experiences, awareness and willingness to participate in the painting’s meaning. Through my work, I reflect on the artist as prophet or seer, the individual tuned into the world she or he resides in.  My paintings are an invitation to the viewer to reflect on and enter the mystical centers from which the artist draws her/his vision.  In this way there is a dialogue between the artist, the viewer and the broader consciousness and sub-consciousness.  I am continually gratified to see that when I represent the specific, I am presented with the universal.

“Blue Steel, Everything’s Broken” was painted in reaction to 9/11/2001 and in memoriam to all the lives lost in that tragic event.  Having just completed “The Mobocracy” in which I’d miniaturized Delacroix’s, “Liberty Leading the People” (influenced by the Old Master series), I quickly realized I could intertwine his dead soldiers with our ironworkers.  In this case, I felt very conscious (although not immediately) that this represents the very painful realization that we’re all soldiers now, like it or not.