ARTIST STATEMENT

My work has transformed over several years from formally disciplined representational work, which included landscapes and portraiture, to abstract figurative work. My initial abstract work focused on the positive and negative forms created by gender-neutral figures on flattened color fields. Details were eliminated to allow the observer to view the painting unhindered by specific physical references.  

My interest then evolved through the abstract forms to include the less visible subject matter of internal emotions. Expressionistic lines, both painted and scratched, move outside and over the initial painted forms. Through this intuitive process I discover and reveal paintings within and over the initial painting where planes tilt, overlap and blend, fracturing space. Layers of glazing and scumbling on the surface create depth in the surface. My process reflects the complexity of our times as I respond and react to form and line with form and line until the conversation is complete.

I begin work by developing small ink sketches of the figure(s) within rectangular or square shapes on paper.   Then the sketch is freehanded onto a canvas of neutrally tinted ground allowing some natural variations to occur in the figure as the size is increased onto the canvas.   Generally the figure is given volume in the under-painting and may remain visible or may be totally veiled by the end of the painting as I build the surface.  The observer senses multiple environments: the painted three-dimensional canvas as an art object; the painted forms that create static and dynamic planes; and the multiple layers of expressive lines and scratches on the surface that connect the viewer, not to a specific time or place, but to energy and emotion.