Trying to express inner thought and emotion through painting can be frustrating at times and then trying to describe the whole process with words can add to the frustration.   The words I write now prove to me how unsatisfying words are as an expressive device compared to painted images, design, and visuals.  Therefore, I am conflicted about visuals that speak non-verbal sentences of their own and, I hope, stand for themselves without words to describe the images.  Ultimately, no matter what is said about a piece of art, it is the viewer’s experience that will shape how the piece is experienced.  Here I will try to describe what cannot be expressed accurately enough through writing.

There is this “stuff” that resonates and reverberates from going about my day that buzzes in my head until I can finally paint about it.  This constant internal dialog needs to be purged through painting in order to quell the internal noise until there is quiet inside.  Soon there is another humming wave that over takes me again until it, too, is expelled.

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.