I believe in the cathartic, even redemptive power of beauty—even terrible beauty, insofar as it has the ability to still mental chatter and ground the artist and the viewer. Such beauty may be experienced through art or the perception of the natural world. I seek to converge those two poles. Beauty is to me found when the mind reaches its end point, when words fail. To engage this aspiration, as a painter, I court images that are not previously known or named, in passages that hint at luminous sources often behind "the thicket” of confusion, unresolved flux and serendipity. Amid sometimes intricate detail, actual and implied textures seek to make the work a thing in the world without referent; an image that is not “about" in any sense but instead is transcendent while paradoxically emphatically present; a new aspect of the natural world infused with the human hand, eye and mind.
I conceive of the artist as a disrupter (of the stiffness of spirit that our habitual ways of thinking and perceiving makes us) but also as a healer and a magician of perception. While the analytic mind taxonomically divides and names, through painting I seek to put things back together again.
Birdie's Last Dance, homage to the artist's mother the month of her passing. 2014, acrylic on canvas, 48" x 60".