Artist Statement

“By priming each canvas with soft grey or muted earth tones, I often see surface shadows emerging once dry. Looking deeply at these remarks, these soft unknowns, I embrace and outline their shapes with pencil or ink, exploring connections, being open to surprises and nuances along the way.

Often a feeling emerges, memories of walks in the woods while growing up in the Hudson Valley, bubbling to the surface on the canvas as my outlines describe horizon lines, distant hillsides, foregrounds of rocks and apple trees fresh with fruit ready to harvest.  Each line may represent a pathway to this memory, with gestures of color and artist marks refreshing each memory and adding dimension and a current palette and energy to the work. Exploring transparencies and opaqueness with monotype techniques, I’ll imprint notes and harmonies on each canvas, obscuring or revealing the initial memory-filled lines, artist marks and shadows, playfully layering, softening and complimenting further explorations with color and gestures.

I’m interested in natural and organic patterns, how my interpretive marks and gestures both convey and alter their identity, parlaying between abstracting and objectivity, incorporating my interests and techniques both learned and explored on each canvas. I’ve been concentrating my painting energies lately on perspective shifts, and all the delivery options the linear and spatial structure avails to me as a painter. Can I push for elements of landscape within the arrangement of shapes, restructured and abstracted? Can a simple organic shape I remember in a natural element still be experienced as I push it into abstraction?

…Conversations started, influences abound, materials being combined and explored, pushed, pulled, as gestural paint delivery and medium explorations…Each day in the studio I ask, “What if I try…” as I begin anew, and am excited for the possibilities and challenges of the days’ work ahead.”