Artist Statement 2006

I am inspired by the search for multiple meanings, layers, and repeating shapes in almost everything that I experience. Since childhood, I've been fascinated with cracks in the asphalt that look exactly like the drawing of a mountain range. To me, the protruding veins on a muscular arm are like a tangled mass of spider webs. An orthroscope probing the shoulder reveals images resembling cresting waves or rocks eroded by water at Zion National Park. I actively seek out these convergences, and try to express them through abstraction and subtlety.

On another level, the works are about being lost and found, masked and unmasked -- a very physical push and pull. It is the struggle that I (and I suppose most people) face everyday -- I disappear in and out of society, in and out of my job, in and out of the superficial that excites me and and eventually drags me down. I'm always trying to escape and then find my way back. This struggle is what leads to heavily worked surfaces and constructions on many of the paintings. The scale of my work reflects this as well, the paintings tend to be either very large (the span of my arms) or very small (the span of my hand). Every inch of the work is critical, and I use acrylics, beeswax, charcoal, oil, rope, string, wood, ink or anything to complete the search, leaving traces of the struggle.

The work that most influences mine comes not from painters but from the two and three-dimensional work of sculptors; the exquisite drawings that Henry Moore made in the London bomb shelters and his mammoth sculptures, the haunting, interconnected paintings of Giacometti, and other artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Louise Bourgeois, David Nash, Petah Coyne, Andy Goldsworthy, and Dan Flavin.