Artist Statement

My paintings take time, time to create and time to see. In our media oriented society where the 30 second sound byte defines our attention span, I want to create a place for study and contemplation, where time is limitless. I ask a great deal of my audience.

For many years, I have been exploring the concepts of still life painting, an area I have found hardly still, but rather filled with animation. My paintings portray the way light passes over and through an object, the interaction of one pattern against another, the play of reflections within and between animate and inanimate objects.

By using aerial perspective and high focus realism, I juxtapose imaginary space with carefully rendered matter, filled with detail. I enjoy these visual paradoxes and contradictions. Many of my compositions come from the lessons of abstract expressionism, while my objects are from neighborhood grocery stores, flea markets and the attics of family and friends. 

The common denominator in all my collections is that they are either very ordinary or visually extraordinary. In Constellation, I’ve transformed the easily forgotten marbles of my childhood into stars and planets orbiting the sky anchored by a series of ellipses.

I am a perceptual realist. I paint what I see. My vision is grounded in the depiction of light; how light creates color and weight while defining space and pattern. This continuing study has encouraged me to compose crowd scenes of bottles, animal and insect playgrounds and fields of marbles. In order to create the illusions of fantastic space my still life compositions are elaborately constructed. I need to observe the interactions of my objects in real time. To accomplish this end, I discovered a way of suspending my subjects by using different levels of plexiglass. For example, in the set up for Entering the Web and The Precipice, I looked through three levels of plexiglass. On the top level are the flying insects, the middle level has the marbles and animals caught in the web, the third level is the color base which becomes the ground for the shells or is the overlook for the mouse.

The effect: some objects fly high above the vortex of yellow or blue light as others are caught and suspended in an intricate spiders web while still more objects lay in the atmosphere of a blue or yellow field at the edges of the spiral. Is there a magnetic pull into the light or are the objects exploding out of it? This is for the viewer to decide.

 

I invite my audience to enter a dense visual world, to come back to each work again and again, to see more. Today one might discover an interesting reflection, perhaps even my self portrait in a marble and tomorrow see the colors and delicacy of a dragonfly wing or be caught in a spider’s web.

Paintings, after all, reflect an intense visual experience, defined solely by what the eye sees. Words, even these, can only be used as a guide, an enrichment of that experience.