My paintings are about color, surprise, absurdity and encounters with the self. Forms collide and transformed fragments merge to become new elements as I investigate the world of space and place. Jettisoned in a soupy field of color, they join and evolve emerging as humorous, sometimes grotesque forms that exist in a luscious mysterious environment of their own making. These paintings are constructions based in part, on the wild overgrown woodland vegetation that surrounds my home, the interior world of my mind and the lively images in my granddaughter’s drawings.

In the work from summer 2011, there is an undeniable shift from earlier abstractions to more articulated evidence of the corporal. In the shifting territory between abstraction and figuration the balance is constantly shifting. Space is simultaneously deep and shallow space, line is anxious and defiant, color is saturated and muted. These elements play off one another in the quasi-narrative that dares to enter into the work. Body parts, tangible, and furtive, skitter across the surface, evoking the emphatic passionate energy of paint, life, and the illusive nature of meaning.  In this I find pleasure moving back and forth between drawing into painting and painting into drawing allowing merging and morphing, chance and process to enter into the construction of the image. It is in the space between abstraction and representation that is the territory of discovery.

Ideas, which spring from jazz standards, fairy tales and nursery rhymes, present opportunities to encounter my playful and mischievous nature. The works on paper are a combination of watercolor, acrylic, and gouache.  Delight in the making is left visible as drips and splatters speak to the urgency and the immediacy of my process. Bright colors and shapes are pushed in a seemingly haphazard fashion as they collide forming strange juxtapositions along side carefully considered formal arrangements. Entering into this work figuration emerges to engage and exist as counter-point or foil in this spatially ambiguous landscape. 

 Photographic work allows me the unique opportunity to create self-portraits that examine history and memory. In these works I embrace melancholic and pensive reflection, tender gesture, and look to capture ephemeral moments that yield suggestions of twilight and transition.