The overriding themes of my studio work have been narrative and landscape. The narratives are not linear, but instead are notional, the stuff of invention and illogic. The subjects have varied from the biographical to the mythical, usually requiring figures although more recently, not. Sketchbooks are where my studio life begins; they are a repository for fleeting words, phrases, images, quotations, and places to explore ‘what ifs’. Vague postage stamp-size drawings lead to obsessions, images and/or ideas compelling me to further investigation and elaboration. Sometimes to push my work further I will devise studio problems, for example, after decades of incorporating figures into my narratives, could they be eliminated and still be interesting to me? A large part of the joy of working in the studio is the opportunity to explore ideas not knowing in what direction they may lead as my recent landscapes evidence. The landscapes are twisted and manipulated into places where an unknown narrative could take place, in place of the figure, the land, the flora, rocks, branches, and puddles become metaphors for the anthropomorphic. There is no signifier of a specific location; they are more about the sense of place and its effect. The plants and landscape elements are visceral as is the lush landscapes of the rococo painters whose work I admire.
My imagined worlds don’t obey the rules of the real but operate in liminal places where they mesh or collide. Where is the edge of the rain, the exact place where it begins and ends? How can a waterfall magically appear out of nowhere or abruptly end? In my previous work this has extended to giving a new story to a mythical Marie Antoinette, moving her into the 20th century, ignoring the ‘truth’ of history.
Making art has always been a revelatory process, I do not begin with a pre-ordained plan but relish the unknown. Could the slip of a brush or the accidental splash lead to new possibilities? Could this paint blob suggest a rock or a puddle? My insistence on a color is frequently ‘corrected’ by the painting telling me what it wants and needs. This continues on a broader scale, I usually think I am doing this, but learn I am really doing something else and I only learn this as I am working.
Among my influences has been living in New Mexico for two years while in graduate school and still being mesmerized by the fantastical landscape and vistas after these years. Clashes between the ways I think about the landscape and its actualities continue filtering in to my imagination. Among the artists I have found to be influential, are Charles Burchfield and George Inness. I have certainly delighted in the narratives enhanced by the evocative landscape settings of the painters of the rococo. The drama of the forest still lifes of painters like Rachael Ruysch or Otto Marseus Van Schreick is seductive. In contemporary painting the colors of Inka Essenhigh and Lisa Yuskavage are always surprising as is their inventiveness.