Currently imagery I am painting includes organic abstractions, Morulas, embryonic divisions, botanical forms, (microscopic and otherwise) as well as sprouting seeds, tubers, and plant life and show how they tie into and emulate structures in animal and human life.

I am fascinated with the Fibonacci series and how numbers, patterns and sequences repeat and appear in all different facets of the organic natural world. Even a paint drip flowing from one end of a canvas to the other creates distinctive design, pattern and shape that appears and repeats in unrelated areas of life. Examples of this include veins in a pair of rabbit ears to veining in stone slabs, veins inside bodies and arteries of traffic on freeways and insect trails. The interconnectedness of things man made and naturally occurring helps me to believe in an overarching master plan that no one has the blue prints to. This inseparability and union reminds me of the relation of all parts to the whole.

When painting, I try to create an image that is neither too illustrative nor so loose that the viewer gets lost without a visual anchor.  Too concrete and the subtlety will be lost, however, images that are recognizable are important to me for their inherent meaning. Symbols resonate and touch places deep inside of me unlocking and spurring on a visual dialog that I have with myself.  In this way there is a pushing and pulling, back and forth, that happens whereby tightly rendered symbols get broken down to visual poetry.  And then I stop, and pause when I write “visual poetry” because that term sounds affected.  However, that is what I aim for.

Among the symbols that I paint are often elements of nature such as birds, deer, trees, and sky because I find them awe-inspiring.   Nature is the one true thing left that can be counted on to speak an unadulterated truth. Nature and animals in nature are untouched by television, work ethic, radio, keeping up with the Jones’s, etc., they just are their unadulterated selves, true beings.  There is much that humans do not know about the inner lives and workings of animals.  Animals do have conversation, thought and process that is completely outside of what humans know about and there is a depth there that has not been acknowledged and accredited.   I am fascinated with painting symbols of imagined conversations, and fanciful hidden worlds that no human can be a part of. When I am in the process of painting them I can enter this world, if only in my mind.

Color is also an important element in painting for me.  I can feel color living, humming, and pulsating inside of me- creamy yellow, acrid green, pungent red, warm tangy orange. As I write these descriptions of color, I realize that color is connected with taste and not just sight so when I am applying the paint I get a sensation of almost tasting it.    I can feel the colors vibrate deep inside of me as I apply them outside of myself; my insides somehow make their way outside. Rich color, texture, and glazed surfaces, the smell of bees wax and turpentine, the slippery feel of oils and resins are all very important in loosing myself in the painting process.