Artist’s Statement:

Someone once told me, ‘Studying is different than reading. Studying is looking very deeply, searching for meaning and understanding’. Drawing is studying for me - but with no words. Drawing people doing yoga postures shows what part of the body is working.

Writing a letter to myself or everyone, is me creating a painting. When I speak I see - in my mind’s eye, images. Perhaps I’m storing them for later reference. My work reflects what I’m doing or thinking about. During covid lockdown, I created portraits based on social media. When I paint I hear - in my mind’s ear,  my thoughts become words. While drawing the social media portraits, I could hear their voices in my memory. My reaction to the messages influenced aspects of the portraits: one subject’s hair glowed, as I rendered her, I sobbed reliving her personal story. Another’s office melted away under my paintbrush as I heard him describing his youthful success in a garden.

Art is communication, but without words or musical notes, paint and other mediums are words. When I work, I go other places. I like how that feels. When I was a kid someone gave me paints and a how-to book. That morning, I started my first painting. When I finished, i  realized I lost a sense of time and place in front of my canvas. I enjoy seeing how materials interact, play, or fight against each other.

When you look at my work, you might get what I was thinking, or learn from my technique. Most people find their own meaning or relationship to the work. I enjoy when people tell me what they experience while looking at my compositions