In Preparation of Spring [2] Painting

Born 1976 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan; currently living in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I am coming out of a decade of figurative watercolor practice, having produced over 10,000 original works in that medium. I have focused the evolution of my work to become more expressive and abstract in line with the painters I most admire: Helen Frankenthaler, William Turner, Cai Guo-Qiang, Franz Kline, Hans Hoffman, Alexander Calder, and Koji Kakinuma. During the pandemic, I began to work digitally, and in oil; exploring scale and process. My current oeuvre of large-scale oil paintings represents the unfolding of observational figurative capture that was foundational to my watercolor practice, while relying on the gestural body reference shapes of my mark making and intuitive compositions. The paintings are informed by landscape and figurative study, but there is complete obliteration of both figure and horizon in favor of decontextualized emotive impact. This new exploration prompted a need to stretch my materials to their limit, prompting research and development of my own painting mediums. I use damar tears, beeswax, and gum turpentine to make cold paste wax impasto medium; frankincense and spike lavender oil for solvent; and refined linseed oil, stand oil, and cobalt drier for my flow medium. While I am working, the scent is hot; it leads many people to my studio. The paintings retain some of this aroma, but it is bound into the polymerized paint matrix. To capture this aspect of the work, I have made a series of fragrances based on the scent of the materials using cosmetic essential oils extracted from the same natural sources from which my paints are made.