STATEMENT OF WORK

My paintings and drawings imply abstracted landscape, with collage elements across vast space; elements often occupy a strange and suspended kind of space, with multiple implied ground planes. There are hovering collaged and painted forms across wide open space. In response to material language and poetic relationships, I often find pattern, repetition and an ensuing sense of musicality and rhythm in open space. In all of my work there is a tension between order, structure, and chance. As thought occupies space, my work gives form to a sense of that fleeting placeness. 

Drawings and paintings begin with a  suggestion of vantage point at an edge or promontory;  through gestural mark-making, color relationships, and collage elements, I build a sense of place for thought through hovering forms, effects, and qualities in space. Much earlier printed(collaged etchings) and painted work explored cliffs and settings where obscure, figurative narratives were more representationally suggested. The segue into abstraction happened gradually through a paring down to fewer elements, abstracted shapes and color schemes that suggested qualities rather than subjects. Early life along expansive Lake Erie influenced a very different sense of space from the subsequent cultural expanse living in New York for many years--and ultimately a Southwest Texas desert expanse has now proved the most profound influence. The abstracted landscape has become an even more liberating thought-space in America’s unsettling, present, culturally-constructed state.

I am currently working on a body of paintings and drawings that continue to explore space and thought in two concurrent ways; both continue with painted and collaged elements--one series through color pattern and rhythm across an implied landscape, and another through a more distilled and pared down focus on line and subtle color as a qualitative language of thought in open space. A recent Guggenheim Fellowship has enabled me to spend months working in Marfa, TX. This informs a recent series of larger, collaged drawings and paintings on paper and canvas.