Pink Horizon Painting

I avoided calling myself an artist for many years, probably because my mother was a painter and printmaker, and I didn't want to follow. Instead, I first turned to pottery, a profession whose inherent earthiness satisfied me in many ways and was a natural extension of my interest in gardening, bread baking, Spanish earthenware pottery, and the tactile qualities of almost everything. And I liked making useful things. But I always painted and drew, from earliest childhood, occasionally winning an award or working as art editor of a school publication. I did a few portraits of my children, decorated some of my pottery, and took a few classes. But when my father died in 1999, I was suddenly seized with a powerful drive to really paint, different from the impulse to dabble. Within a year I had given up pottery entirely, rented a studio, and was exhibiting and selling work. It’s very hard for me to explain why I paint or what my goals are. I always end up boring people to death talking about the process of what I do—how I mix colors, how I get lost in a mindless reverie, how I never know when starting out where a painting will take me. Of course, perhaps a painting is inspired by the sea, or by a great sadness, or by the hills of Tuscany, or a political upheaval. Perhaps it is, but only in the most general of ways, and I am rarely thinking consciously of anything when I paint; I’m only responding to the visual things going on in the painting, wandering in the cloud of un-knowing. So my paintings often don’t have any stories and only occasionally contain recognizable objects. They create moods through light, color, scale and contrast. They have to stand without verbal explanation and speak only in visual terms. There is meaning in a juxtaposition of hard against soft, yellow against violet. We don't need to say what it is in words, but we know when we see it. You may laugh at that old cliché, "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like," but it's probably the most accurate description of the process by which a work of art speaks to the person who is looking at it.