Statement

I am drawn to art on a sensory level: the music of charcoal scraping across paper, the smell of linseed oil or Belgium linen stretched over archival board, the texture and transition of light and color on wood panels, the feel of wet clay in my hands. I love to touch the materials I use. Even after a sculpture or a painting is finished, I run my hands across it.

Creating gives me solitude and meditation, a way to appreciate the beauty of being alive. I work eclectically: photo realistic, abstract, with archival materials, sheetrock or newspaper, with clay or concrete. Sometimes, I work with a long stick and a piece of charcoal at the end, like Matisse.

The process of painting and sculpting plays off of each other. When I paint, I often start by working charcoal marks into layers of wet gesso creating an underdrawing, like a palimpsest, building up marks toward the final image. I suspend pigment in layers of medium, engaging the tactile properties of paint as intently as the visual.

When I sculpt, I describe form using value transitions from light to dark, as a painter does. Sometimes I activate the surface of my sculptures with tiny scores or pulls of clay, in the same way I’d drag charcoal across paper. In painting, I use an Amber Varnish to ‘hold’ the paint; in sculpting, bronze is poured to hold and maintain the original clay details.

Of all the forms in nature, I most enjoy the human: how muscles, tendons and bones connect; the complexity of concave shapes, and the way one tiny movement releases a cascade of changes. Recently, I’ve noticed how a psychological form can live alongside the physical. In a synaesthetic sense, this is the harmonic interlude, between the feeling states of mind and the physical forms, which impacts my painting and sculpting.

As I work, I often think about the mathematics of pure form and actual form, the relevance of integration and sums. I imagine the height of my process as unleashing the human spirit to give flight to my soul, and the foundation as a mathematical expression: an integration where I aspire to be summed and integrated, one bit and one day at a time.