2009 #6 Print

The inspiration for my paintings comes from artists who set the stage for abstract expressionism, such as J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, Georgia O’Keefe, and those who made AbEx one of the most important artistic movements within modernism, including Jackson Pollock, Norman Lewis, Clyfford Still, Lee Krasner, Ad Reinhardt, Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, Willem de Kooning, Kazuo Shiraga, Helen Frankenthaler, Gerhard Richter. Most of these great painters spent parts of their careers creating figurative art. Pollock is known to have said “I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time.” Our eyes cannot resist searching a work of art for familiar images, but my work is intended as non-representational. Just as Pollock did with most of his ‘action’ paintings I date and number by way of naming my work, to provide as little preconception to the viewing experience as possible. With a debt as well to process artists I select colors, sheens and viscosities and watch how they interact on canvas. Sometimes the magic doesn’t work; I’ve re-worked canvases a number of times. When it does I’m fascinated by the richness of color in the interference patterns and the strong resulting sense of motion and form. At times I see these paintings as details in themselves; parts of larger works that are only hinted at, orders of magnification which in turn can be magnified, allowing for ever greater detail and delicacy to emerge.