My work considers the formal, material, and perceptual possibilities of abstract visual language using a process-based painting approach.
I build up layers of paint color in an improvisational flow. Each piece becomes a site for gestures, impressions, residues, and subsequent excavations: an accumulation of mark-marking histories. I try to find ways to introduce moments of material serendipity in the work to bring about a dynamic image. My process is a choreographed collaboration with chance.
Relying on nontraditional tools and industrial-mechanical means of paint application, I record the body in motion while disguising the hand, complicating the notion of authorship within the work. Marks are processed and manipulated. By layering these painted forms to create a transient image, I hope to communicate a sense of memory and the passage of time.
My work proposes illusionistic space while asserting its physicality in real space. Fluid-borne pigments and reflective mica absorb into textured grounds to create surfaces that transform when seen from different viewing angles. I’m interested in the idea that seeing might become almost tactile, vision crossing over into touch.
I find inspiration in the process of making as well as out in the world. My paintings draw from the incidental beauty of daily aesthetic experience, never discriminating between the monumental and the mundane. Seen colors, textures, and light effects all make their way into the work. New York City’s gritty urban surfaces and its less-traveled landscapes provide an endless source of new ideas, as do my travels.
Abstraction, rather than “meaning” something, celebrates the process of meaning-making itself. The abstract invites associative, sensorial dialogue with the viewer and opens up new pathways of thought and interpretation. In a world flooded with images vying for our attention, abstract painting asks us to slow down and become present in time.
(2024)