ABOUT THE WORK

I’ve worked at making things for most of my life. I work in order to find an answer or two to my questions, and it’s a joy when something appears within my work that leads me to think that I’ve asked the right question.

 

I’ll never know all the answers, but the explorations that have arisen over the years do help me understand some things: I’ve learned that creation arises from destruction. Seen in terms of my materials, I cut, melt, burn, tear; then paint, sew, mend, until something new happens. While these steps are basic to me, it’s also a universal process. Tides haul detritus out to sea, where it is transformed, and carried back to land. Relationships are broken, mended and strengthened; interventions resolve and heal; people find the power to conquer tyrants. 

 

I deal with both my passive and active nature, my ripe age and youthful outlook, each side yearning for its own freedom, but also dependent on one other. I aim to find the balance between opposing ideas; to maintain an effective equilibrium in making art within my capabilities, my craftsmanship. I aim to be both at one with my materials, but also to be free of assumptions about their limitations; in other words, to play as I work and vice versa.

 

I love music for its abstract nature as well as when it is set to a text; a symphony or a song. In art, I love to work both in recognizable imagery as well as non-representational, abstract art. The secret for me is that all my work is inspired by nature: close, far, messy, perfect, mundane and awesome. I’m in love with the details, the square inches of light, dark, bright, transiting across the art on the wall or the ground beneath my feet. When I observe someone looking at my work, I know that they’ve ‘got it’ when they are pulled into the work to see its details and then back up once again to see the big picture. That movement echoes what I think of as my dance as I compose the work.

 

I see beauty in the midst of chaos. It's difficult to appreciate beauty these days, but it's even more important to discipline myself to do just that. Beauty provides calm and strength: strength to care, to be kind, to be resolute, to love and be loved, to heal.