I am a painter, pastel and ceramic artist who is interested in exploring the place where painting and sculpture meet. My early work was with oils or acrylics on canvas, later with pastels on hot pressed smooth watercolor paper. I began to add colored, fired, clay-based forms for greater dimensionality, spatial manipulation and additional expressive potential.
Historically color has been applied to sculpture and relief to suggest greater realism and confirm the illusions of traditional pictorial space. My picture space is not traditional; it is ambiguous, often with shifting connections between forms that appear to exist in real space but do not; and those that do exist in real space but are tightly integrated into the picture space. My best work moves beyond spatial puzzles and is expressive of the conviction that while our universe is dynamic, plastic, ambiguous and sometimes uncertain, human connection as biomorphic allusion represents a joyous and comforting counterpoint.
The ultimate advantage of clay is that its surface can be simultaneously colored and altered while leather hard, encouraging an ongoing dialogue between form, surface and color to confirm or deny forms in space. After firing, I extend the “what you see is what you get” world of ceramic underglazes with pastels, acrylics, oils, encaustics and other traditional media, as appropriate.
As an extension of this exploration, I have been investigating resin casting the original clay forms to make opaque white as well as clear epoxy replications, with applied color and collage components. The concept of three-dimensional editions with variations suggests an exciting way to advance this exploration of space, form and color.
My method is inherited from Abstract Expressionism. I prepare by focusing on some overall interest; it can be as general as “constraint” or “expansion,” or as particular as a political protest. The process is often one of discovery: each form, mark, or color leading to the next, shaped by that focus, until meaningful structures emerge. My subject matter is largely abstract but, as the world becomes more challenging, I find myself sometimes including more representational imagery in order to extend more explicitly the metaphorical reference.
As important to me as making this work is, so too, is teaching. I love the dialogue, whether it relates to student work or to mine. The exchange beyond one’s own world is incredibly enriching and the opportunity to participate in someone else’s creative process is a provocative and persistent gift.