Aqua Alta 5 Painting

I make abstract paintings originating in observation. I have learned to trust what I find visually enthralling in the world has deep connections with questions I have about how we experience and inhabit the world. Growing up between Gary, Indiana and Chicago, Illinois, travel between these two cities along the southern shore of Lake Michigan shaped the dialectic at the core of what I have brought to my exploration of abstraction: the miles of steel and oil industry lighting up the sky with flaming towers, through which one can glimpse the spaciousness and unbroken horizon of the Great Lake. I am drawn to movement of light, reflections on water disordered by what lies underneath, and the premonition of metamorphosis perceptible in natural structures. In the way that sound, rhythm, and breath build compression and express feeling in a lyric poem, I use contrasting color, contrasting spatial depths, and a wide range of marks, gestures, and the physicality of paint- from sheer washes to thick impasto - to suggest the way intimacy, alienation, struggle, and freedom exist in the psyche in a constant state of flux. In painting, the power of gestural line leads me to engage with the complex, exuberant paintings of Italian Baroque painters, Giambattista Tiepolo and Tintoretto in particular, whose Venetian color, animation, and high-spirited gestures, are very alive and relevant to me. I aspire in my paintings to express a profusion of activity, developed with a keen desire for uniting near and far, small and large, the loud and the quiet, the rent with the joined.