Anybody who has drawn or painted for any length of time realizes that the intensity of creative work cannot be maintained at a consistent level. There are times when I am overwhelmed with visual ideas and wish I had another pair of hands to set down my perceptions. At other times everything seems dormant, though I realize that this is part of the ebb and flow of life.
Is my visual message strong, simple, and to the point? Have I gone beyond the subject and touched on a more profound universal truth? Have I overworked this to the point of no return?
I marvel at the beauty and generosity of the people who allow me to search into and contemplate them. What is the source of their strength? What wounds are they carrying? How are we the same and how are we different? How can I do justice to my sitter’s integrity?
I am always trying for a visual synthesis of the sensual realism in Baroque still lifes and the cerebral structure of cubist still lifes, not quite there yet, but I am reconciled to the fact that painting is about striving rather than arriving.
The past ten years have been incredibly transformative physically, mentally, and spiritually. There is real richness there, something magical and beautiful, which I’m not sure yet how to translate into art. I am looking forward to creating a body of work that comes from my core. I can feel the stirring and rumbling within, it is coming!
As a young child, I could not be stopped from drawing with anything, on anything, all of the time. Nothing has changed that.
Most of my images are sparked by vistas from my studio or home and also from iconic objects that are in my studio.
Art in general isn’t nearly as fun or powerful in this age. You could say there’s a positive side to all the access we have to art, as well as the exposure, as artists, we can get outside of the traditional structures. But I wonder if it’s worth what we gave up. Too much art exposure can bore a person. You can also become impervious to the effects that art can have on us.
For a very long time I thought art was all about esthetics, beauty, grace. I did not look at other dimensions, such as distortions, unbalance, pain, darkness. Now I try to reach both, very much like in nature, there is life and death.
While a good abstract painting is an event on the canvas, I strive in my figurative work to do the same.