Statement

The focus of my painting studio practice is no different from the practice of living— a steady undoing, a constant letting go. It turns in cycles through stages of nothingness, growth, beauty, death— like the flowers in the garden.

Along the way it's a bit of a contraction, experiencing a creative path of plurality while letting go what is to become singularly. Walt Whitman's "I am large, I contain multitudes" reminds me who I am and how I've always navigated and created art. I am a hyphenated artist working in many mediums over the past 40+ years as photographer, painter, writer, dancemaker, performer, and musician.

Many of those mediums still inform me, though are left behind now for a sole painting studio practice.

In the studio, I sit with the discomfort of that unfolding and not knowing. Uncertainty is very unsettling. Though if I step aside, if I loosen my grip, curiosity takes the lead, and something unexpected begins to breathe.

I give myself unfettered boundaries and permission to wander in and out of abstraction, form, color as well as organic representation and beauty. Some paintings are instant; others might evolve over years. I resist dating the work because on a quantum level time is not absolute. Maybe all moments in time exist simultaneously.

Abstraction is a strange one. Nothing is known in the beginning. Hence a certain uncomfortability exists. Lots of falling down in the moment. The only way to make a painting is through it. Paint is layered, stripped, and buried again. A razor blade, belt sander, Dremel—tools of erasure. Raw pigment, binder, silt; spread with worn brushes, a putty knife, or simply poured. Sometimes colors are chosen by intuition, not reason; I'll even paint in the dark.

Throughout my painting career I've incorporated organic images in my work, usually abstracted, often as they are transforming. Recently I've been simultaneously creating a more pronounced body of work entitled Bloom. It is a celebration of beauty and joy. Imagery might be borrowed from painting to painting, just like the garden cycle. After a flower blooms, it drops seeds, and thus new flowers sprout.

Making the same painting over and over bores me and I let discovery go where it's going to go.

Regardless of the body of work, process is painting as verb. Improvisation is constant. And then, almost without warning, a painting arrives— a noun, a presence.

The cycle continues: curiosity, procrastination, patience, attachment, chaos, arrival. Again and again, I practice the art of undoing. Preciousness is surrendered.

And though everything is impermanent, there is a moment and perhaps even a declaration— the painting exists.