Artist Statement

I construct my paintings and drawings using a delicate balance of choice and process.

I begin a painting by building up layers of paint with fluid mixtures of oil color and medium, which creates an open, unlimited, even chaotic quality. As I work, I pay attention to how colors and forms touch and how they bleed into each other. I then rework the layers using a liquid, matte white paint to define negative spaces and to carve out positive forms, reducing, simplifying and introducing order into the organic, unformed background.

In response to personal narrative and internal dialogue, to the push and pull of the compositions internal gravity, and to the medium of the paint or drawing materials, I project images and forms onto the surface. As I compose, I weave shapes through the picture plane, the gestures I record can read alternatively as flat, or as dimensional and sculptural. I favor forms that are nature based and that tangle and overlap, lean, sit and hold. In my newest works, the compositions are hybrid and formal, have moments of representation and are infused with a sense of movement. I bring together shapes and lines that are biomorphic, animated and gestural. The ways in which the forms sit, touch, tangle and lay creates a space that is open to narrative.

As I work through the multiple stages and processes, by weighing representation with ambiguity, by erasing and adding, abstracting and transforming, I gradually arrive at the final composition.