statement

My paintings are inspired by small encounters and unlikely juxtapositions. Curious yet familiar, the abstractions are intimate, animate, and embedded with time. Inspired by observation and experience, these paintings resolve slowly into compositions inevitably balanced between fixity and flux. I choose to work within limitations or parameters to expand a chosen vocabulary limitlessly. In this body of work the simple horizontal stroke is the essential element to which I return repeatedly to tease out new meaning and discovery.

As a sort of navigational tool, I often use the following excerpt from Pablo Neruda’s Toward an Impure Poetry, which I love:

“The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things – all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

“In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substances, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.

“Let that be the poetry we search for: worn by the hand’s obligation, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.”