STATEMENT OF WORK

My painting practice has always had an aspect of structuralism; I deconstruct the materials of a painting as well as the lexicon of Painting, as a way to engage in building up meaning through form and language.

About 20 years ago, I began painting directly on un-stretched raw canvas. I think this directness with the canvas, though still acting as the support to the paint, made me approach everything differently.  The canvasses’ inherent materiality could not be ignored.  I began experimenting in different ways of how one makes a painting.  I wanted to highlight the support, and prioritizing the cotton fabric became my focus.  I started folding and manipulating the canvas in various ways. This experimentation resulted in an excess of painted canvas.  Both out of frustration, and out of limited resources,  I started tearing up my paintings.  Weaving the colorful strips was the next move.  I liked the idea that the paintings held gestures of both destruction and care.

The more recent work, presented here, continues my exploration of torn color-field paintings; where I paint large fields of color on canvas and then tear the painting into strips.  The image is rebuilt and often reshaped, and the overall scale is reduced; adding depth to the surface and to the image itself. Canvas is used as the last manipulated material in these images, shifting the gesture from the painted stroke to the tearing and assembling of the canvas.  I think of the shapes in the paintings as bodies or landforms, and instead of being contained by the recatngular space, they 'grow' outside of that space through built up canvas shapes that i call growths, bumps and appendages.