Traces 2 Painting

As I go about my life, I collect memories and raw material as sources for painting, printmaking, and mixed media work. I engage my body and my senses in notitia, or attentive noticing, absorbing spirit and sensory environment, capturing images and letting them capture me—inscriptions and graffiti, patterns of pavement, steps, or the lines of architecture, figurative forms or objects, color and nature. In my studio, after a time of reflection and incubation, I submit to an active process of non-judgmental, improvisational mark-making. I begin energetically by striking the canvas with sumi ink. I continue to work spontaneously with palette knives, my fingers, sticks or string, graphite, and occasionally brushes. The work builds with fragments of memory and evidence of process: disrupted surface and structure; calligraphic gesture; things defined and obscured. I seek to trust the immediate response or mark and strive for what Hsieh Ho called “spirit resonance.”