Artist Statement
Hopefully my work is not all that easily consumed in a brief setting. In many ways I hope to baffle the viewer, or perhaps deflect the viewer by challenging him somewhat. It is when we are not exactly sure what to think is when our minds are engaged to work at the journey and, hopefully be rewarded for the efforts. A beautiful painting of the red hills surrounding the area in which I live can mentally be a restful stroll. There certainly is a place for a good stroll. There are, however, times when we need a good physical climb over rugged territory to challenge us, the rewards of which can often be quite exhilarating. As an artist, I look for the good climb.
In my work, I am responding to emotional stimuli in a way that is visually realistic, yet abstract in context. Although I wish for the viewer to feel a sense of what I feel, the purpose of the work is to give the viewer a jumping off point from which he can explore on his own. What each of us sees, we filter through our own particular psyche, knowledge and experience, which, in turn skews our view of the ordinary, rendering, instead, something extraordinary. Reproducing a scene or object is not what is important. Such importance comes from creating a dialogue out of the ambiguities found in a particular assemblage of items.
I love color in all its vividness and muted variations.
I love history and the layering of time through imagery.
I am drawn to the collision of the real with the unreal.
I am fascinated with the narrative and the symbolic that can expand the experience.
I employ irony to throw the viewer off guard and juxtapose humor with the serious.
At the present I am concerned with black, white, and grey tones being over taken by intense color. I am also drawn to the contrast of physical texture and the lack of it in my work. I love the interplay of patterns of fabric upon the patterns of paper, the weight of stone and wood against the abstract of air, the richness of gilding, the decorative embellishments, all the details that feed the eye. I love the element of light and shadow in all its theatrical exaggerated forms. I love the use of movement played against the stayed and the rhythm of repetition as seen in the painting “Sound of Mind”. In “Venice” for example, the delicate and fragile elegance of a Moreno glass teeters on the edge, its contents disrupted, and the future of its existence in doubt. The glass flute, or beauty, is on the verge of extinction as are the burning flowers in “Spent” and the decaying stage sets in “Night Wings”. The lily, on the other hand, represents God, or that which is good which overcomes all that is ugly as in the painting “Light”.
In the end, I hope the terrain is not so rugged that it turns you back before you begin and that some personal discoveries are found along the way.