My Soul Does Not Sink Painting

I engage the intuitive subconscious to construct pictorial ideas that are realized by employing a photo collage strategy. By compositing fragmented imagery for my paintings and drawings, narrative undercurrents emerge that call for decoding. The image sources are photographs I have taken and others are appropriated. The latter imagery is employed using pictorial elements removed from original context. Work titles, often poetic fragments in sentence form, are chosen in a manner similar to that which I employ to integrate imagery in the artworks. I frequently draw from poems by R.M. Rilke, Pessoa and by contemporary Ukrainian poets. Titles augment the work as they are in dialog with the imagery. They serve as an additional means to access process and decipherment. As my body of work has been developing, influences from current global conditions have been taken into account, expanding my intentionality out of necessity. Many of these paintings and drawings project states of anxiety, tension and sometimes despair. In all the work, gesture is a signifier of meaning, as figures exist in unreal spaces that defy logic. Emergent narratives have no linear structure. They are meant to be felt, not understood. I am interested Jungian psychology, feminine archetypes, symbolic spaces and surrealist intuitive techniques. I am inspired by Goya's black paintings, the Surrealists, Quattrocento Italian painting, contemporary narrative painting, Japanese prints and photography.