Often in my painting, what is expected is not what actually occurs. And as a narrative painter, I hold with Sylvia Plath’s quote that I have reworded, “Once a (painting) is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the (observer).”
I’ve spent most of my life building a compost pile: years and years of paper slips of ideas and little studies and jots, photographs, sketchbooks, journals of images and words, stacks of visual resources, books, thousands of figure drawings, pages of colors, and a horde of odd collected objects.
Approaching my work formally, drawing from this pile, I combine and explore a personal assemblage, populating my own strange spaces with syntheses of animal and human figures, archetypal images, cultural and art history references and biographical material. Eccentric and heady, the imagery arrives/emerges from the play between sketchbook studies and the working of the paint on the canvas.
A sense of humor and a delight in illuminating the absurd lead me to metaphors of human folly and irony, as I toy with the artifice of hierarchy. Relying on personal insight and honesty, I strive to capture a keen observation of human behavior and along with it a psychological punch, as I hunt for a pictorial truth – a visual completion. Discovery is sometimes funny, and I have found laughter to stimulate the evolution of my work.
I investigate my world with an adventuresome approach to color, surface and paint, as I work back and forth combining drawing with painting. Because spontaneity is a part of my process, the final painting usually arrives as a blend of critical, formal plan and chance. Thus, I heed Louis Pasteur, who said “…chance favors only the prepared mind.”