STATEMENT OF WORK

I love tuning color.  The sheer energy of color motivates my actions. Color is not an object, and emotion is not an object. However, both can be bound into an object. Like a vine to a lattice, the color enmeshes with the object and changes it. The accumulation of decisions and adjustments is a record of time, memory, and touch. For the past several years, my subject has been musing about where architecture meets nature in the voice of color.

The objects that I work on come from my daily life. Artmaking is integrated into my place and community. Construction waste, building off-cuts, driftwood, found wood, and abandoned paint colors are the starting points of my labor. My challenge is to make something one wouldn't want to throw away from thrown-away things. My paintings have a sculptural presence, and my sculptures have a painterly presence. I take great pleasure in physically joining materials in solid combinations. When I use paint, I also consider color's ability to create space and make solid connections. It's about opening another dimension and looking into a container. Paintings summon an event. They are creatures and need to breathe through their viewers.

I embrace the power of meaninglessness in art. Everything is a fragment of language, and the visual format allows the ability to make collisions and generate emotions outside linguistic classification. You have to go somewhere to bring something back. For me, that place is governed by intuition, impulse, and curiosity. Making art is seeing things that aren’t there yet and making them exist. As the art historian Alexander Nemerov commented, “Not knowing is a well which is deep.” The photographer Diane Arbus adds, “It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.”