ARTIST STATEMENT

As a visual artist, I record with and within the life of forms. I work toward greater fluency in the language of morphology, plasticity and beauty. Through my work I am gaining a greater understanding of my material, of seeing, and of the meaning of life. I am concerned primarily with the totality of each piece (be it solitary, diptych, triptych or otherwise) with respect to an intrinsic rightness and interconnected beauty. I consider everything I do, think and feel to be an abstraction of some kind. The uniqueness of the abstraction is what makes it mine. So, my work is abstract but I consider every work of art to be so. Therefore, my paintings and drawings are abstractions of something and something to be abstracted from.

I love mystery and dreaming because I love to be in a place that is generally mysterious with lots of unknowns. I love places that are greater than preset systems and formulas. I think I simply just like it when I and others can't have all the answers. I like to question things and I think its really cool that dreaming is generally a safe place to people have where stuff doesn't make a lot of sense. And yet I also feel that dreams, like paintings, are where things make more sense to me.

Like Picasso, I am interested in taking my work as far as possible without it falling apart. I like to resolve pieces that have fallen apart in fresh new ways. I love to work from a model in the landscape and in interior spaces. I consider the figure to be a reflection of my psyche as well as a reflection of my relationship with humanity. It also reflects the model and my relationship with the model. I think the figure is a parallel to me and that my work is, as Cezanne said, a parallel to nature. I think great art and great music, like life, are dreamy, mythical, symbolic, and poetic. I like that art can also be playful, humorous, and often contradictory. I love how things that might not seemingly go together, can actually morph together to form some sort of poetic rightness, some form of truth or revelation or Beauty.