STATEMENT OF WORK

My art is figurative and includes works from my imagination as well as works from observation.   I am interested in storybook simplicity and the gentle handling of darkness and complexity within children's stories.  And a constant preoccupation is what I call 'original innocence,' or the universal vulnerability that comes with being a being in a body. Whether a portrait subject looking out at the viewer, forever vulnerable to projection, prejudice or indifference, or two symbolic and elemental predator and prey animals circling each other forever on the canvas, the sense of vulnerability through encounter with a seeming other is fundamental.

I also notice a tendency in my work toward a certain bareness. My paintings would rather err on the side of clumsy or naked than too refined - it is important that the first energy is preserved.  I try to paint with more than just the hands and fingers with their close connection to the mind of distinctions.  The same impulse is seen in the simple means that I use:  just paint on rectangular surfaces, nothing fancy; or if technology-based, then the most humble, one-button recorders, unstaged real-life sets, and minimal editing. Things that a child could use.

There is a contradiction here, for in painting I now use exclusively oil paint, a medium of long and refined tradition, not a child’s medium.  

I like this contradiction, for it points to the comedy, even the absurdity, of the ambition of simplicity or elementality.  …“Start from the beginning”?  A likely story!  I know that I stand on the shoulders of a hundred generations of artists, even if I sometimes pretend that I don’t.