Artist's Statement

My goal as an artist is to express my thoughts in a concrete way, whether by drawing, painting or sculpting. I love the process of creating a work of art - the feel of pencil or pen, the application of paint, the stretching of canvas, and the technical decisions to be made. For me, ideas for paintings arise in profusion. From my earliest paintings I have been interested in using the tension between lines and shapes to create different moods and impressions. I may use sharp angular lines and shapes in one painting and curvilinear in another. In some paintings lines and shapes are drawn with instruments, while in others they are drawn freehand. I have used floating forms, reflections, shapes and shadows, flatness, depth, color relationships, and negative and positive shapes to achieve the different moods. I have experimented with adding movement by the use of two superimposed canvases with cutouts in the top layer. When placed on a well-lighted wall, the shadows created by the cutout sections move as the viewer moves.

The current paintings combine free flow with hard edge images and explore the interactions of color, line and shape. A recent group of paintings explores the effect of salt on liquid paint. The salt dissolves and recrystallizes – large crystals form where the paint was more liquid and smaller crystals form where the paint was less liquid. This creates an interesting texture with a subtle sparkle.