Artist Statement
Emerging as a painter during the postmodern nineties, I was initially interested in using historical techniques and strategies for critical purposes. From 1999 my work explored the connection of the landscape genre and the idea of the sublime to histories of conquest. With the media of watercolor and ink wash drawings and oil painting on absorbent ground on panels, this work depicted waterfalls, caves, sinkholes, and intersections of human development and animal habitats (Prospects). I was particularly interested in portraying animals as projections of loss and desire (Creatures).
Over time my subject matter has expanded to ideas of nature and the sublime considered through both representational and abstract means. In 2004 I began making paintings of abstract crystallized structures on panels, paper, and three-dimensional forms (Grottos and Open Monads). Each painting is produced incrementally through the accumulation of geometric shapes of transparent color on an absorbent ground. The shapes accumulate, establish patterns, and develop into illusionistic spaces as I superimpose one layer onto another. This working process has become for me a metaphor for organic growth processes that operate in organized, predictable patterns while responding to novel and random conditions. In this work I share my own sense of wonder before an order that is boundless and infinitely complex. At the same time the work appeals – wistfully – to a utopian, modernist belief that the highest orders of consciousness and of the natural world may be formally and mathematically expressed.
My recent work reinserts the “micro” formal process of abstract, crystallized forms into the “macro” space of icy landscapes, attempting to bring disparate graphic languages into unsteady equilibriums. In these works on paper (Extremities), melting icebergs are psychological metaphors expanded by the catastrophe of global warming into emblems of collapse. Their monstrous depths are alternatively hidden and revealed through transformations over time.