Evanston, Autumn Street

Artist Statement

I create work because I am compelled to make order in an entropic universe to understand my personal history and history in a larger context in the present. In this way, I find meaning in the world. I want to express that meaning to other people and to generate a conversation about how their experiences and understanding of the world and mine align and how they differ.

I continuously strive to abandon internal controls that do not serve me in life or as a practicing artist. I struggle with everyday life experiences and work to freely express those challenges in my painting. These efforts and my appreciation of blessings shape my vision.

From the start, I have represented my inner world as a three-dimensional realm—sometimes an interior with a window view or a mirror reflecting an imaginary place or sometimes just a landscape or people gathering or a person, a portrait. However, the painting is a unified, impenetrable surface of flat shapes (a puzzle) and I want viewers to see/understand this dimension as well. A painting is a paradox as is life.

I manipulate what seem to be opposing dimensions and ideas to create work that has dynamic unity. Two sunflower stems that overlap change to an X-shape, a table reflected in a mirror transforms into a table that is running into the mirror and the frame of the mirror becomes a simple, rectangular contour. Often, the viewer doesn’t see these individual manipulations, but if I’m successful they stimulate a more sustained and imaginative reflection and a feeling that they are looking at something of life, something that changes from one thing to another and then another.