Artist Statement Physicality of materials plays a very important role in my work. I utilize a variety of media; most often oil on wood/ panel, or canvas over panel. But drawing is also an essential process, where again the physicality of substrate plays an essential role in the outcome of an image. I have also been experimenting with plaster (over plywood) constructions that I paint with a combination of gouache, watercolor and tempera, but with the added variable of carving and scraping into the plaster surface. These pieces seem to be a hybrid of painting, drawing and construction. Whether I am working on paper, slate, plaster, wood or canvas, the tactile feedback of whatever substrate defines the character and progress of an image. I think my particular touch requires a resilience of surface that allows for the back and forth process of scraping, gouging and applying of pigment.
I never begin with a preconceived image. Quite often I begin with a series of marks or colored shapes that ultimately yield to an entirely different set of marks and shapes. This process is as mysterious as it is inefficient. Decisions about color, shape and thickness of paint or pressure of mark are in continuous flux until a kind of resonance of cumulative decisions and chance conveys some form of tension or evokes a kind of abstract narrative.
Like the process itself, the idea of an "abstract narrative" can be a state of contradiction or irreconcilability. Inherent in making abstract paintings are formal concerns of figure and ground relationships, color and shape juxtaposition, but the process is also inflected with a reordering or the intrusion of observed and remembered objects or phenomena. It is the means by which the process of painting can slow and extend perceptions of sight, thought and emotion and allow for various and simultaneous possibilities to exist.