Artist
Statement : Return to a time when nature was more
than a backdrop that you walked through or drove by, a time in your childhood
where all the fairy tales had not been outgrown or explained away.
Imagination ran free, unacquainted with the adult world of ‘facts’. Here
was a world not yet fully defined, not yet labeled and categorized. Remember
finding that magical tree where anything and everything was possible, that
secret space where trees became circus performers, magicians, dancers, and all
things fantastical. It was a world so charged, so brimming with
possibility that you could close your eyes and see the space through your whole
body, with all your senses. It was a child’s world and only children can truly
live there. I have explored this world throughout my life and work.
The scenes I depict do
not exist in the physical world. The images themselves are soft, organic
and fluid. I seek a complex surface that allows the forms to speak to the
air that surround them. I want the shapes to breathe in the space and be
bathed in light. Through pouring and wiping, the application of brayer,
palette knife, and sander, and sometimes the stroke of an actual brush each
piece emerges from the white canvas. What coalesces there is an image where
time and season, scale and shape become indefinite and fluid. Is the sun
setting or rising? Is it spring, autumn, or both? Is that a single
leaf, or a towering tree? Am I crawling through a tight closed space,
discovering a vast world just around the corner, or tucked away in a secret
space? The works are always full of wonderment of nature through a
child’s eye. As in dreams or memories, everything is brighter, more
fanciful, surprising, and magical. The world of the child will always
belong to children but I invite you to visit it with me anew.
