Artists Registry

PREFACE
Writing my artist statement is something I have refrained from doing because I have an aversion to explaining my art. I’ve always felt that if I create a finished piece of art, that successfully translates my concept or inspiration to finished product, it will hopefully speak for itself and whatever it says to the viewer, it's the right message because there isn't a right or wrong message. I believe that each person takes something a little different from the work and that that freedom of thought and individual interpretation is at the essence of what art is.

INFLUENCE
My influences are first and foremost everything I see, feel and experience, but my art has also been influenced by my life-long obsession with travel; love of literature; contemporary culture; international culture; and our sociopolitical environment.

I didn't set out to produce art about one subject or another. None of it was intentional - it all developed and evolved over time. I rely on our desires for beauty, poetics and seduction to initially attract the viewer’s attention.

I think of my art as a composite of visual fragments incorporating found objects, drawings, paintings, photographs, letters, and symbols. They are improvisational, schematic works in which original elements and the ready-made are fused to invite the viewer to move into a space of speculation and provoke questions of our making of the world through language and action.

THE PROCESS
Though I work quite deliberately, consciously employing both traditional and innovative techniques, my unconscious is the undisputed project manager thereby freeing my imagination and providing many opportunities for happy accident and grace to influence the finished product.

I paint from the inside out. For me, the process of creating art is as important to the inner development as the end result is to the outside world. I believe the array of emotions I go through in producing a work of art is as much a part of the piece as the techniques and the tools I use.

The iconography in my work comes from a lifetime of personal and cultural experience incorporated with familiar visual symbols and text, arranged into new conceptually layered pieces.
As my personal history and culture are my life's foundation, each layer I paint on a canvas becomes the history of its surface. These layers accumulate and influence, yet not always overtly. Like sediment, they build. By mixing the acrylic paint with water and gloss medium to make a thin wash, the translucent quality of top layers reveal aspects of the painting's history. At other times, a thick impasto hides the past. Yet it is there beneath the surface and has had its influence nonetheless.

I used strong colors and forceful brushstrokes in my painting to emphasize the painting process instead of using paint to carry out a visual idea, I aim to provoke discovery of the visual idea through the process of creating it. I also use hand-written, stenciled, or die cut text to embellish mundane objects or paintings and thus provide clues to the creative process or subject matter. Stenciled and hand-written text and language remains a prominent feature in my work.

I usually work on several bodies of work concurrently. Each project often consists of multiple works, often in a range of different media, grouped around specific themes or symbols. During research and production new areas of interest arise and lead to the next body of work.

While I use a variety of materials and processes in each project my methodology is consistent. Although there may not always be material similarities between the different projects they are linked by recurring formal concerns and through the subject matter. The subject matter of each body of work determines the materials and the forms of the work.