Artist Statement
I grew up in Southern California where nothing is subtle. The colors are vivid and so is the culture. As an adult, taking my first real art class in England, the land of subtlety, I learned to be comfortable with my looseness and lack of refinement and to be BOLD. At the time I was working in textiles, using threads and fabrics to create very textural abstract works. Coming back to art as a painter, I found I was still attracted to very textured surfaces, bold strokes of paint and many, many layers. I like to work in collage because the possibilities of manipulating surfaces are endless.
Exploring themes in a series of work, I sometimes paint the same image or symbol over and over in different ways, with different media to tease out the various nuances. My education was in literature and writing and still figures into my work as most of my pieces start with words which are then abstracted into lines and forms and sometimes rediscovered.
While my painting may be figurative, narrative, or non-objective, they are expressionistic and abstract, although someone once called me a "muscular painter'. I strive to create a symbolic language to represent the emotional themes of my work. Although I take inspiration from so many things- family relationships, social issues, and memory, my main intrigue is with identity and the tension between who we really are and how we present ourselves to the public.
My paintings are complex in their layers of paint, paper, drawing and found objects, but not nearly as complex as we are.