STATEMENT OF WORK

My practice involves the creation of subtle order through the use of strong patterns, grids and geometries. Working with a wide range of media on canvas, paper and wood, I endeavor to create a visual language through an ongoing process of exploration and experimentation. The work is built on an evolving set of interrelations, rather than just a system of themes and variations. The latest series of paintings are a return to these earlier compositions and ideas utilizing grids and circles. Rather than moving away from the immediately preceding body of work, it is an integrating of the thoughts and processes acquired during these investigations. 

The “Pentimenti” series, is so named since it began with the act of painting over existing canvases where the circular geometry was a part of older works. Pentimenti, by definition means, “a visible trace of an earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas.” In essence these paintings are picking up from an earlier series, but with a renewed interest in surface and scale and that includes a fuller color palette. Previous works were much more reductive and the use of color was intentionally restricted. The grid still exists, as a hint, at the intersection of the circles on the canvas plane when the circles are cropped off and continues now within the composition of the elongation of circular forms into "lozenges."

Sculpture has recently come into my visual vocabulary as a means to activate the circular forms into occupying a more three-dimensional space. Working with the material of rounded solid wood spheres, I am also incorporating aspects of physics into this work. Depending on which angle that they are viewed from, these sculptures appear straight stacked or curving out into space thereby creating a tension with gravity. This simultaneous execution in sculpture and painting allows for a visual dialogue between these two bodies of works. The collision suggests new possibilities for a continued exploration of ideas and materials.

Continuing to move into this body of work, there are other references that become inspiration. For example, stacking, as in totem poles, the dolls or “poupées” of Hans Bellmar’s photographs, as well as architecture and archaeology, which has revealed churches built on temples and mosques on churches.  Within my painting process, there exists a conversation between these ideas and the abstract works that I create.