Artist Statement

I discovered at a young age that magic and art-making share creative attributes. A sense of wonder. Conjuring something from nothing. Creating illusion. And a mastery of tools, practice and skill to execute. 

An early fascination with representation and trompe l’oeil arose from this confluence of art and magic. Something that is not actually what it appears to be. An illusion of reality. Art as a stand-in for reality; simulacrum.   

In the search for more authenticity I gravitated to abstraction, assemblage and conceptual work exploring the nexus of mystery, myth and magic of the human experience. Instead of art portraying visual reality, the art object itself and any associations thereof became the authentic experience.

I am interested in the primal effects of light and color to engage the viewer in a meditative, reflective state while also exploring the emotional weight that colors hold. Thinning colors and applying them in a glaze fashion, light passes through them and reflects back off a white background. This imbues the colors with a glowing effect as they meet the viewer’s gaze.

My work is also concerned with form, shape, tactile surface and physical presence. The intersection of body and spirit with our shared collective human memory. And how art and story telling bind us to that memory.

I have a restless curiosity. The visual style of a work is intrinsic to its content. As such, evolving interests demand evolving styles. The arc of my work is long and varied resulting in different visual styles each of which best embody what I need to express at any given time.

Recently I have reintroduced representation into my work with a series of black and white paintings inspired by Film Noir. In addition to brilliant and often classical composition, the sense of foreboding and fatalism depicted through Film Noir’s chiaroscuro cinematography is an apt metaphor for society’s current zeitgeist of fear, paranoia and violence. And the random fragility of life that it reveals.