CURRENT WORK


Recent Work

"Other Landscapes" - my current body of work - has become more realistic in an expressionistic way in contrast to the abstract work that preceded it. My aim here is to approach a landscape as I would an abstract painting rather than adhere to all the realistic aspects of it. I am not interested in making logical sense. Space is often very flat in many of these works. Problems that arise in the painting process as a result of taking risks and the attempt to bring that to some kind of resolution is an important part of painting for me. Taking risks with painting leads you to create something you could never have imagined before. And that journey to a newly discovered place is the reward of the whole project. I am seeking a direct human emotional response to my painting, not an intellectual or heavily culturally mediated one.


Dystopolises and other landscapes

Topographies, earthy texture and earth seen from above are the things I return to often for inspiration. There is also a micro-macro aspect to the abstract Dystopolises surfaces: we may be viewing the surface of the earth through a microscope or a telescope. "Dystopolis" is a made up word which refers to a possibly future, possibly post-human earth. It refers to our alteration of the earth with our projects and buildings and effect on the environment. These paintings are very textural and objectlike in that they do not portray illusory space. The focus of these works is materiality, texture, process and experimentation. The immediacy of the texture pushes the paintings into the same tactile space and time we inhabit. I come from a sculpture background so that informs the object quality of these paintings.

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Paper

This work is in the space between painting and sculpture and is characterized by textured, layered, curved or torn paper. There are three bodies of work that sometimes overlap: collage on the standard rectangle, collaged paper in unusual shapes and three dimensional collage. The texture in my work is built with different materials including acrylic paint - often along with various textured gel mediums, layers of paper including textured paper, Japanese, Indian and African papers, corrugated cardboard, paper mache, sand and other materials. The final result is process-driven through my response to materials as they are used. Imperfection, abjectness and roughness coinciding with beauty and a kind of humble elegance are my main goals. Of importance is the physicality of the work without reference to illusory space. Nature is my biggest source of inspiration for shape, color and texture.

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ARCHIVES

Mixed Media:

My exploration with mixed media is driven by a need to create works without illusory space, and is focused on materiality, texture, process and experimentation. Some of my materials are vintage fabric scraps, saved or found "trash", burlap, plastic, foam, paper, twine and twigs. My materials and formal choices are intuitive and very much dependent on the process as it develops in their creation. I apply chance processes in my work, preferring to not dictate the shapes of collage materials myself, but to use things as I find them for the most part. This work is often layered, stuffed, quilted or wrapped with left over canvas and other fabric scraps allowing some results to exist in between classically defined categories of sculpture and painting.
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Textile

The work is based on a fragment of an idea and then developed intuitively and organically during the process. My work is autobiographical in that I try to express the feeling I have of the time and place I grew up in. Things being reused and repurposed as well as things being jerry-rigged were typical on a small mid-century farm. Imperfection, abjectness and roughness coinciding with beauty and a kind of humble elegance are my main goals. I use mostly scraps of fabric that have a history of use by other people and there is sometimes damage from wear or stains that I embrace. Other types of materials are used that suggest fur, bark or vegetation. I feel that my approach to this work which involves imperfection and roughness is also in some way a rebellion against our class system and economic entitlement and strives to become accepted on its own terms within its own limitations. My work has roots in the Arte Povera movement in the commonplace and worn materials I use which present a challenge to established notions of value and propriety.

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Oil Paintings:
My oil paintings employ an additive and subtractive painting technique that create layered “maps,” which can be read across the uppermost surface or down through the painting’s layers, often seen through the wiped off parts of each layer for the pathways. I like to think of these layers as the co-mingling of the past and the present in our experience of life. The subtractive wiped areas and the transparent areas, which simultaneously reveal and conceal previous layers, expose the past. The solid and transparent areas and lines which block previous layers and assert the most recent activity are the present. This is the way we live our lives - with past experiences illuminating the present and the present experiences reinterpreting the past.
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Terradaptions:
My body of work, Terradaptions is based on the graphic qualities of aerial photos of earth. Derived from satellite views of mostly urban and industrial areas, these images were computer manipulated as sketches to work from and then further cultivated with paint on canvas. Employing transparent layers, blurring and invented occurrences, Terradaptions create dreamlike geographies. The finished paintings can be interpreted on a metaphorical level --as a snapshot revealing an area's psychological or oneiric state at a particular moment.