ARTIST STATEMENT
I am currently working with traditional subject matter and medium in an untraditional manner. I am taking the landscape, or the still life, or the figure and making it my own by translating it into my language. I consider my finished paintings whole objects, things that I have created by ejecting them from my psyche through the process of painting. They are evidence of my travels, the ethereal made physical, thoughts embodied and contained. Nature is not only often my subject matter, but has always been a pulling force in my life, artistically, personally and in the space between. Nature shows us everything we need to know about ourselves and the society we live in. It eats itself, murders itself, absorbs parts of itself, mutates, changes and adapts to any opportunity or catastrophe, and we do too. A plant germinates and grows according to its genetic properties, and expands in fractal patterns that determine its structure, but the outside world also influences the growth of the organism. It is this giving and taking process, this ebb and flow, that we also experience with the world around us. When I am working, I am aware of my physical capabilities and limitations; what I can give and what I can take within the space of my body and its movements, the flat rectangle of the surface I paint on and in the space between. I work quickly and intuitively, trying to limit the amount of translations between my intuition and my hand. I attempt to obtain a balance between representational imagery and abstraction because I like the idea of something familiar being obtained by the viewer instead of presenting a completely abstract, closed language.