Chosen Strangers Walking Moonlit Grass Pathways Artwork

I am a contemporary painter, living in Los Angeles. My current paintings and drawings center around themes of fading memories, impatience, urgency, aging and grasping for control. A sense of longing and loss that runs deep as we deal with a fast-paced world dominated by our electronics, social media, slow downloads and our own brain limitations grappling with adaptations. My latest body of work centers around fading memories, impatience, urgency, aging and grasping for control, which are really just alternative words for an overall theme of longing. Some of my work draws from past childhood memories and trying to reconcile certain events coupled with a feeling of loss from fractured relationships. The painting process or the assemblage of mixed media can provide a meditative or contemplative aspect and with that process, a subtle healing of past painful, childhood memories can occur. Some work draws from abstracted imagery I’ve come across on my phone as it slowly downloads to a recognizable image. Both types of imagery and memory retrieval have parallel similarities and lead to a certain abstraction and haziness of the images attempting to be conjured, fully realized and made better sense of. While it can be very frustrating for me that these images (both on electronic devices and in my mind’s eye) can stay distorted and difficult to fully retrieve and therefore, resolve, I have learned to accept the imperfect and the inevitability of uncertainty. On the upside, the abstracted image or memory provides a new reality which becomes the catalyst for a new work of art. In terms of my painting and assemblage process, initially my impulse is to create something very specific I see in my mind’s eye and when I decide to release some of that control and think less about the details of the work, very exciting things emerge. I used to think that I had to be very logical about painting and have it planned out in advance and exercise much control over it. While that may be a successful approach for some artists, I found that for me and my process, it made for very uninteresting, belabored work. Years ago I was also told by an art teacher that I needed to clear the cobwebs and I think that releasing some of the rumination and over-worrying has allowed more freedom in the artmaking.