Artist Statement
My work finds inspiration in my family history, art history, and the way individuals and society perceive the world around us. It is influenced by a range of artists including Gerhard Richter, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Rauschenberg, Edouard Vuillard, and Vincent Van Gogh.
My process involves selecting a theme, color palette, and feeling that I intend to impart, and then engaging in a process of adding paint, removing paint, adding paper or other mixed media, removing, and then adding on again. The process involves using a combination of predictable and unpredictable techniques. I often use contrasting colors and apply the paint with various tools such as palette knives, brushes, and sponges to build up the piece. During this process I meditate on whether the work is moving into a state of completion or not and use my intuition to guide me.
Through these techniques I create both non-representational abstract paintings and loosely representational abstract works. There are plans but there is also an intuitive improvisation. I often name a piece based on a combination of intention behind the work, memories inspired by the work, and/or intuitive visual association.
I view my process as a metaphor for an evolving consciousness. Over time, layers of experience are added, each of which may or may not alter the work’s fundamental character. I think of my work as an artifact achieved by this layering; each layer an expression of an event in time.
Like people's experiences, some impressions stay, some fade, and some live beneath the surface with vitality and peak through only under certain conditions. The visual complexity mirrors the complexity of our living, evolving, and interacting with new experiences. The abstraction highlights that we don’t often know what elements of our histories create the feelings, the thoughts, and the essence of our perceptions.
My hope is that my work provokes reflection on the way our individual beliefs, perceptions, and feelings are unique but also linked to a greater mosaic that transcends our individual experience.
