“I would like to paint the way a bird sings” Claude Monet
Storytelling is central to my current work where images emerge through narrative portraits, abstracted figures, and family archives. The beauty of nature, humanity, memory, experience, and dreams inspire me.
My imagery unfolds from realism and my imagination. Painting, drawing and collage are employed using color to experiment with relationships, patterns, and rhythm. The craft of printing is used to hand print collage papers.
Working in series allows for a deeper level of discovery and understanding. For the last three years ‘Beating Hearts’ has been a major effort. This series engages people in the community through interviews, and conversations. Stories, memories, experience, dreams, family archives, and identity are shared and put down in words and paint. Receiving the Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artist Grant in Painting has allowed this project to go to Philadelphia to engage Gay men and Drag Queens for narrative portraits. The project has begun but had to be put on hold due to the Covid-19 virus.
During the Pandemic year, I spent many hours in the studio experimenting and playing with materials and imagery. By June,2020 I found myself drawing every evening with gel pen and small sketchbook. I had no intention when drawing, I allowed my subconscious mind to flow onto the page, responding to each mark and image with another. By September, I began creating paintings inspired by the drawings. These works became ‘Streams of Mystery’, a new series.
Through the beauty of art and the complexity of life, my current works explore the strength, courage, joy, dignity, challenge, love, trauma, and compassion that we all share. The stories can connect us in ways we never expected and ways we come to feel as part of ourselves. The viewer brings their own experience to the work as we do in life when we meet each other. As the tale unfolds these images show the ordinary with all its beauty, uniqueness, complexity, magic, and mystery that we all hold within.