Free Falling Into Colonization Painting

When I was 4 years old, I was painting. When I was in my 20s trying to figure out my life, I was painting. When I was in my 30s studying to be an illustrator, I was still painting. The reality grasped me slowly. It took the encouragement of Fred Burton, the inspiration of the Abstract Expressionists, and years of self-examination to realize that painting is what I do and a painter is who I am. It is my natural state, my default activity. I could appreciate other forms of art, other career choices, other ways of living - but I was not engaged in any of them in the way I was with painting. As my painting career began in earnest, my work steadily transformed. I began by combining the simplest elements of drawing - the line, the dot, the duality of black and white - with the complexity and depth of brush strokes to create a new language: my own. Being my own first audience was challenging, as any new experience can be. As I came to terms with my new career, my work continued to evolve. Having been heavily influenced by Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hoffman, and many others from the New York scene in the 1950's, I began considering the idea of deconstruction and deformation in my art, a method that has pervaded all of my work since. The story goes that Robert Rauschenberg nervously approached de Kooning with the idea that he take an eraser to one of de Kooning's drawings, with the intention of creating an entirely new work of art. . With this idea in mind - the idea that the process of mark-making or unmaking transcends the actual piece of art - I began to explore the possibilities of losing myself and the work in the process. My recent work begins with still life subjects, but by the time they are completed, they look nothing like the original form. The process that each painting undergoes is not about describing the subject, but un-describing it. New drawings are introduced and the landscape changes; fundamental elements are erased and recovered, layered, pushed, pulled, deformed, folded, collided, deconstructed, and completely transformed. The result may be unrecognizable, but it is informed by personal memory, conscious and subconscious influences, and forces beyond of the scope of the original painting. Every new piece I paint is a conversation with the subject, the surface, and the artist. Every shift in style or process is important, but not lasting. Every work is intimate, open, and ongoing.