I explore ideas just as an improvisational musician finds his "lines." The dialog between ideas
lives in me like a fascinating story I'm telling. The painting has to be better than the idea in the
first place. I want to see what happens through the "chance encounters" I have with paint, in
the moment. Free like this, invention surges up and I paint out of curiosity: a problem area in
the painting becomes a foreign country in which to travel. I continue to strengthen the major
concept as it is forming it's way to becoming "whole." I can never quite get there, but I
get closer as I develop my skill, over time. I enjoy the struggle and the search, reaching for
the inaccessible.
A familiar shape worked out in the last painting gets obliterated in the new one, for it cannot have a name, which has already been spoken. My painting process is always unsettling, completely passionate, radical, and driven, but it is the paint itself that guides me to a place of wonder. The painting has to be better than the idea, which was the paintings original intent that alters through time.
My painting is a surface into which to look; that is what drives me to push the beginning paint brush marks further: to go deeper in. I love to see open, breathing, moving space create entry way inside the picture plane of the flat surface of linen. It is the act of breathing life onto the canvas that enables the paintings surfaces be like windows or mirrors into which to look. It is the architectural construction of a painting that moves me. It is how colors relate that guides me there.
While referential to landscape, my paintings are not objectified; they dont hold objects, but they do hold spirit, souls, and memory, air, all of which rise up in a form conducive to be said in paint. The paint finds it before even I do, that makes how colors relate be everything. The complexities of every day life stay outside the studio. But what lives in my heart stays in the mere act of touching paint. I edit constantly, (scraping and reapplying paint). I feel like I am at a construction site breathing life onto the canvas through a simultaneous building up and a tearing down of color. The colors 'sing' through the light that emanates from the color combinations themselves. I 'listen' for the hidden secrets embedded in the paint itself, and pay attention to how it wants to move across the surface of linen. The surfaces of my paintings resemble ancient walls, in that there is a sense of history alive in them, through the repetition of the "placement and replacement" of paint many times over. I try to convince my students that they cant expect to get it right the first hundred times, that it is necessary to go through the search process. A painting gets born when it has a specific presence that comes alive in it, that seems, for me, to come together only at the very end through the last accoutrements that fine-tune it.
Each of my paintings represents a crystallized chunk of formal experience, as well as being very personal at the same time. My paintings are earthy, rock-like and weighty, and yet they have in them the rhythm of the sea. I am a nature painter; the nature "out there" coupled with my own internal landscape. My "inner" finds the equivalent "out there."
I have a need to communicate personal experience, to send waves of emotion that look like the painting got painted with little conscious effort, having a quality of a time distortion effect, even though the painting took months of concentration to pull together into what whole impact it finally becomes. The journey is never over; I always see more to do, but then, knowing when it is time to move on to a new painting is an art form unto itself.
