I never know what a painting will look like before I begin.  A painting starts from nothing, a blank idea.  Every action then creates a reaction.  My work is a dialogue with and between materials, process, image and thought.  Working on canvas, paper or wood with wax, oil or pencils allows me to repeatedly layer, counter process, build, evolve so that lines, curves and ideas arrive at specific tensions between color, shape and surface.  A new layer brings forth an old layer or tosses it into the background or hides it altogether.  I try to leave a bit from each layer to create a pentimento effect.  The work sometimes references images from the unconscious, which provide a reality long forgotten but with the ideas own logic, prescience, and character.  

I photograph the pieces at every stage as I proceed so I can see the progression of how the painting’s thoughts evolve and change, and to hold on to each stage to preserve the thought so that it does not slip away.  I show the work in groups, in sequences to provide the story – to show their evolution.  Although the work is abstract, it is my mind’s landscape, a window into the world of my mindfulness.  I often begin with an object that comes from somewhere and then proceed to dismantle and obliterate it, so that the object is there in memory.  The color and texture are feelings.  I use many different mediums to create a tactile quality.  The colors are usually spontaneous and random but then identify their relationship that I can build to new levels.  

Black is special.  Of all the colors, Black is the strongest emotion.  It has taught me to open my eyes to see that other colors need their own story.  To make color stronger to fight Black so that they can provide a relief from Black and make you remove Black from the forms so that they can bring the needed joy.  I am interested in this dialogue between color, space, structure and form and history.  I play with the emerging geometric shapes in space to activate the organic against the geometric.  Purity and color against mathematical structure that does not change and does not bend and can not let out what is there. 

The Covid years turned lives upside down.  I wondered what I would do being away from the studio.  I turned to small drawings using construction paper and colored pencils that my sister gave me.  I became obsessed with drawing.  I finished 200 drawings.  I fought the darkness which led to the series that I call “Pandemic Drawings and Paintings from the Dining Room Table”.  The new way of working for me, opened up new mediums, materials and scale.  Ideas needed to come faster and they did which added to spontaneity.

I am back to the studio now and still working at the dining room table.