Artist Statement
My work consists of collage and oil painting on canvas, with occasional drawn elements. The drawing and collage function as a sort of scaffolding to hang the painting on or around and are often eventually buried in paint. I find the color by applying many thin layers of paint, at times leaving the history of my process visible by painting up to the edge of a drawn line. The surface of the painting depicts the surface of water, in the form of distilled wave patterns. Light and shadow reflects on the surface, figures and forms are described beneath the water. The pattern of the waves functions as a sort of grid within which the figures and forms are distorted and repeated, made strange, forming their own image logic, approaching the threshold of abstraction.
The process of making these works is rhythmic and repetitive. Working on them becomes a sort of meditation or marking of time. The image expands and contracts throughout the process and I feel as though I could work on any one painting forever, but eventually I land on something, hopefully something full of ambiguity and potential: an accretion of material and time on the surface of the painting, depicting something like the surface of water.
I am exploring themes such as love (generally but also love of nature specifically), loss, time, and duality (body/soul, mystical/metaphysical). In this body of work, I have eliminated the horizon, thinking of the water as a sort of boundless infinity upon which the images of the self and the other can play and dissolve or be formed or transformed. One question I am asking with these works is, how could I paint the feeling of the passage of time?
