Artist's Statement 2006

In our ever bustling and chaotic technology driven culture, I believe in the profound role of color and the disappearing mark of the human hand.

The marks I make reference how I see our civilization and technology interacting with the natural world. Just as people do, my marks often band together into dense flurries of activity, marching and dancing in contrast to large open areas of color. I am intrigued by how individual parts/people/marks can stand alone, and how the dynamic changes when grouped together, I watch this in my daily life and it finds it's way into my work.

The atmospheric moods and environments in my paintings are built by allowing many layers of translucent oil paint to flow and interact with the surface already there. There is a simple structure in our world, upon which I build each painting: control and chaos. After mixing the paint to a specific viscosity and careful placement on the surface, I allow the materials to do what they want; flowing, pooling and intermingling with the proceeding layers. As I watch this slow dance unfold between surface and paint, I step in by manipulating the materials- adding, erasing or sometimes changing the opacity of the paint. I always bring the painting back to the brink of control; this balance of looseness and control becomes the foundation I build upon. When I am satisfied with the environment in the under-painting, I bring more tightly controlled brush strokes, marks and colors over the atmospheric ground to inhabit it, just as we do our own environments.

Akin to sheathing ourselves with technology, the paintings reside upon a slick, cool, fabricated aluminum panel– a favorite for housing mass-produced technology. As our technology/little aluminum boxes become smaller with increasingly tiny screens for us to interact, I have been building the aluminum frames deeper to play with the illusion of something inside while the surface of the painting is experienced.

Just as we animate our own environments- paint, color, scale and composition seem to glow and breathe life into the metal in which the paintings nestle. I am fascinated with the dialogue of materials as disparate worlds collide.

Solo Exhibitions

Selected Group Exhibitions

Press

Selected Collections

Awards

Education

BFA, Painting/Drawing, California College of the Arts, Oakland/San Francisco, CA, 1998