Artist Statement
Artist’s Statement
Work and Methods
…
Every step we take on earth
brings us to a new world.
Every foot supported
on a floating bridge.
And I know that there is no
straight road in this world—
only a giant labyrinth
of intersecting crossroads
…
Federico García Lorca, from “Floating Bridges”
I have always felt closely aligned to poetry and dance when I am creating my work. The first being about ideas, thoughts and feelings that can express the physical, and the second, dance, itself a poetry of physical motion. I have always tried to adhere to the best of both, using color, form, and line as metaphor, analogy, and narrative to get at intuitive and emotional content.
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I like to get the paint to just the right viscosity and love its splash and splatter, but also love the tracks the brush can leave when you slow down in the painting process. The physical act of painting and drawing can become a form of dance. I think that this is where I feel close to dance in that my work encompasses what I can do with the range of motion that my body allows.
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While color is itself a gesture, I also think of color as a poetic force. Certain colors can express various emotional content. Sometimes colors don’t want to reside next to one another. It can be a challenge to make it all work together. There is a lot dynamic energy in the acts of painting and drawing on different papers, composing by tearing and arranging, and then gluing them together to express my vision.
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A lot of my work gets titled once finished and in a somewhat autobiographical manner. Sometimes titles are sentimental, evoking a time, place or person I have known. I like to use loose puns and rhymes that may or may not make “sense.” This is a form of play having to do with my love of language. For example, in the series title Northly, Westly I have modified two nouns into adverbs, which may be nonsense but rhymes with a name with great meaning to me.
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Titles can reflect my poetry of color and often suggest a certain range of color. A title that concerns the sea or a vista of great distance may call forth a particular shade of blue. Titles having to do with night might call for darker shades that go near black but are still discernable darker shades of violet or red.