Artist’s Statement

My older sister took me under her wing when I was twelve and introduced me to drawing and painting. We drew medieval cloisters and men on railroad tracks under a rainbow sky. I still have the pungent smell of cobalt blue paint in my nostrils decades later. She was my anima, my first guide who led me to see the magic from which art was born and the feelings that emerge from its lyrical atmospheres and from beyond its horizons.
My drawings form from minute strokes that accumulate and expand across the paper without any overarching design in mind. I use small patches of these drawings as the basis for my paintings, enlarging a few square inches into covering sometimes 10 square feet. One aim of this is to shunt my conscious mind to an obscure siding, so that unseen creative forces may come to the fore with surprising results. My conscious mind does play a role in this creative process, of course. But I hope that the resulting images convey the mystery, beauty, and energy that is life as they emerge from realms beyond the illusions of time and space.
My creative sessions begin with a contemplation of three paradoxes of human perception: that the eternal is found in the present moment, that matter and energy are one, and that this eternal oneness--what is variously called chi, life force, the essence of life, or the unifying love of God—manifests itself in a manifold of forms. Matter is energy in its tangible form (E=mc2) while spirit is energy in its incorporeal form. As an artist, my calling it to be transported by the flow of energy as it is transformed from its unified state to its appearance as visible form through the labyrinth of the collective/individual unconscious and the actions of my body and the agency of the tools it wields.