| Artist's Statement |
I am a self-taught artist, and that learning process is at the core of my work. I started out as a piano player, then became a lawyer and, after that, a television director before finally starting to paint.
I believe that all of those previous pursuits—especially music—inform my work and affect how I approach being an artist. Like my “past lives,” my work can sometimes appear to be a contradiction.
My development has always emerged from conflict, that effervescent energy fighting any attempts at control and creating a certain tension between the grid that I score onto each of my panels and
the chaos that my abstractive process produces.
My work always begins with photography. I travel extensively and take thousands of photographs, and it is the spaces where man meets the natural world that captivate me. Photographs of natural forms,
such as waves contrasted with manmade structures like bridges, continue to inspire me when I’m back in the studio. As I sift through my photos, I create matrices of images to work from. The beauty of my
grid system is that I can include multiple images, abstracting and superimposing them in a single piece.
My paintings blend documentation of the real world with my own physically exercised psychology, and are often described as containing dualities: organic/linear, manmade/natural, ordered/chaotic,
structured/amorphous. I believe that these dualities represent my striving for calm and balance in my life, and that the juxtaposition of my aggressive, abstractive energy with structured form consistently
results in my most successful work.
To support my visceral energy I paint on wood panels of laminate birch with solid alder sides. These strong, stable panels record my aggressive and subtractive manner of applying and removing paint.
The physical and psychological come together in this process, resulting in paintings that can be at once percussive and soothing.
2011 |
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