ARTIST STATEMENT

Growing up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, I spent much of my childhood in the outdoors, exploring fields and orchards, climbing fences and trees, riding my horse along the river, and flying homemade kites in the open sky. The contours and rhythms of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the fertile valley and the winding Shenandoah River indelibly imprinted my childhood memory and imagination. Just as my poems are imbued with open spaces and a sense of place, my paintings are informed by my desire to create, define and claim the small physical space of the canvas in relation to the larger canvas of the natural world. I am centered and grounded by the hands-on immediacy of the creative process, but at the same time, that very process pushes me beyond the literal rendering of the work and allows me to evoke the lyrical, a bit of the narrative and sometimes the dreamlike.

My paintings start with a palette rather than a predisposed idea of where I am going with the work. I respond intensely to color and I am fascinated by how different colors intersect, interact, and evoke emotions, moods, memory and imagination. My process is one of adding and subtracting paint , marks and texture until I discover an emerging image or pattern that invites me into the painting. The process then becomes one of leaning into that image or pattern and working up against it to create resonance and a sense of balance and structure.

Along with color, I am also immensely interested in texture. I use everything imaginable to create marks and a sense of dimension and tactile interest in the painting, including sticks, paper, string, sponges, stencils, cardboard, plastic wrap, forks, spatulas, bottle tops and any interesting object that comes my way. I rarely use brushes.

As a poet, I try repeatedly to incorporate language in my work but have found that its specificity often gets in the way of the visuals. To counter that, I sometimes use a deconstructed and/or distorted alphabet to create the semblance of text in my paintings. Rather than evoking a particular meaning, the scribble of indecipherable letters and words serve as a reminder of the essential nature of language to our humanity.