STATEMENT OF WORK

Painting has become, for me, a meditative process. It teaches me patience, kindness, and insight, allowing imagination roam freely. My hands know long before I do, (how to place color, how it moves space and creates volume, and the color harmony I get from how the seasons change the landscape. I have a need to keep surpassing what has worked in the past, an incessant curiosity to 'say the thing better.' No internal discussion about anything, just present in the moment of 'seeing.' The process I go through is such a mystery to me, a search beyond what I even try to understand anymore, (but just accept), as though I am not the one painting: another force tells my hands what to do, how to move the paint on the canvas, and that alone is what I trust. I feel the right decisions right up from my feet through my body to how the brush finds the gesture. Bruce Chatwin's "Song Lines" describes aboriginal people communicating at great geographical distances through the earth. My painting comes from the earth. My paintings are directly informed by the Impressionists and the Abstract expressionists. Compositional concepts absorbed decades ago are continually evolving within me to this day. I best express my most passionate realities (the story beneath ordinary everyday life things), producing on canvas much of what people feel when they get religious.  Beginning a painting is an act of faith. I look for spatial relationships right away; the color finds the shape, creates the volume between colors.  The picture plane in the paintings changes constantly through the volume that color creates, (in a constant state of relational movement). What one thinks is coming forward then shoots back when in relationship to something else coming forward. In the landscapes everything that exists between gravity and sky exists in relationship to everything else, (i.e., the sky pulls back further proportionately to the foreground coming forward). The general misunderstanding of a painting is due to missing it’s spiritual and technical qualities. If the observer’s eye is not trained to equate formal visual problems with them, (such as where things exists in space in relation to each other), he/she will search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a painting, looking for representational things instead of music-like relationships.