ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I paint representational images, often of woodlands and animals, in gouache or acrylics on canvas or media paper. I also depict landscapes, seascapes, cats, dogs, and human figures and faces. I paint at home at my desk. I’ve often got more than one painting going at the same time. I’m self-taught and have drawn pictures and comix and painted all my life. I dislike wasting paint and will often paint a canvas with whatever is left over from a previous work as a base layer. The result, having to work over or even fight colors to depict new images, can suggest images in themselves, or give a painting a conflicted feeling or mood. Sometimes though I’ve just made a lot more work for myself. It’s hard to predict, which I like. The decisions an artist makes about when a viewer will be able to identify the images in their work are interesting to me—from across a room? five feet away? two feet away? A fair amount depends on that answer.

For eight years I had a daily practice of drawing non-representationally with both my dominant and non-dominant hands. It taught me a lot about composition. It reinforced my inclination to just see what shows up on the page. To arrive at my own representational visual language on the other side of that practice has been a delight, even as frustrating as it can be to capture the proportions of something like a deer nose.

With what I hope is humility and a lack of fussiness, my work is ultimately addressing the mystery of life. I often see this mystery more clearly through animals than I do people. I wonder sometimes if I’m being a bit of a coward by not depicting suffering in these images as it is a part (often big part) of an animal’s life. I do try to capture and recognize that animal’s lives are as real and important as anyone else’s are. And I’ll always maintain there’s sacred in the cute, whatever diminutive connotations that word has. In any case, for me, examining this mystery through a specific lens of the natural world is the best way to get closer to it. This is less an attempt to solve anything (although I’ll take it) than to locate and describe my experience.

My hope would be for a viewer to feel recognition, consolation, amusement, joy, some sort of truth, and/or pleasure in this visual language of mine, but, in any case, to be inspired to locate or make their own.