Artist Statement
I remember being attracted to finger paints as a very young person--I loved the viscous texture of the paint between my fingers and their tangy, detergent-like aroma. Back then, my masterpieces, proudly displayed on the refrigerator, were often muddy messes, but as a I grew older I began to admire how masters of paint could organize a chaos of color and texture into a balanced finished piece, how a seemingly carefree, but actually precise, economic daub of paint could suggest entire worlds of meaning.
My work seeks to capture some of that childlike joyful exuberance in the materials themselves. I work primarily in acrylics and usually start by applying an impasto mix of background color to the canvas with a painting knife. I select a palette of hues and build my paintings up in textured layers of color, often allowing glimpses of many layers to spill through to the final image surface. My abstract pieces seek to amplify and exploit the chance variations that occur when applying paint by hand in an unstructured way. My representational pieces begin in a similar manner, but employ familiar imagery from photographs or physical objects, painted with a combination of painting knife and brushwork, to organize color and texture into ordered form.
At the moment, I am working on a series of still lifes inspired by my travels to Greece. Looking at Byzantine iconography inspired me to try incorporating gold and other metallic hues into my work, and observation of the design aesthetic apparent in Cycladic art and architecture prompted a minimalist approach to subject matter. Instead of exhaulted religious figures, however, my still lifes focus on common, familiar and often overlooked items, reinterpreting them through the use of color and scale. So far, the subjects of my still lifes have been mainly organic, but I plan to continue the series to include man-made subjects as well.
