Bouquet with Butterfly Weed Painting

I want my paintings to emerge from an open ended visual conversation that comes from paying attention to what I see. We learn from quantum physics that the act of observing something changes it. It seems that just by observing, I am changed also. Combining paint, high key color, overlay drawing and collage elements create a place of intense visual experience. These layers are a way to work out the paradoxes that I find to be a part of each day. It’s an exploration of the possibility of transcendence in the midst of ordinary life. My subject matter has a past life –used, inherited, and inhabited. Glass has it’s own metaphor of how we perceive. It sometimes creates a distortion and sometimes acts as a clarifying lens. Flowers and weeds are included for their allusion to fragility and for their association with arbitrary categories. What I might call a weed, you might call a flower. Collage materials create a tension between public and private. For example, the shared nostalgia from old storybook encyclopedias are entangled with the thick paint of ecstatic moments in the studio. Still life and landscape painting are ways I can express ideas about emotions that aren’t so easily put in words. Yet words are always floating around...in this case they show up in fragments of dislodged text. We all have a daily experience of domestic life. The dilemma is becoming blind to the familiar. Ultimately, I find, that these small moments are a great place for discovery, for awakening.