STATEMENT OF WORK

As an abstract painter employing loose geometry and casual directness, I have long been committed to a process that allows the viewer to see the artist's hand at work. Recently, however, this idea has taken on a new, literal meaning: In my latest body of work, biomorphic shapes recalling hands—or parts of hands—meet, touch, and overlap in space. Imagery has snuck back into my abstraction, with a new vocabulary of wavy lines, ovals, and circles based on knuckles, fingers, and nails. Shapes are character studies; lines are narrative accounts. A simple curvy line may evoke a pair of hands, bending the threshold between figure and ground. In this body of work, the hand not only acts as the tool for the making of the painting, but as the structure around which the painting is formed.

I often work on paper, one drawing leading to the next until I've hit upon the one. This one sometimes becomes the jumping off point for larger, oil-on-canvas works. These paintings exploit oil paint’s chimera-like material qualities: its ability to (literally) go from translucent washes to pure, dense pigment to oleaginous thickness--as well as its (illusionistic) capability of conjuring up any state of matter, from the density of a black hole to something lighter than air.

My works are grounded in the process of their making: I’m sharing an observed moment or chasing after a fleeting idea. The viewer brings another set of ideas, memories or experiences to the work, completing the circle, arriving at a different point than where we began.