Waters Remembered #5 Print

I am a painter and have worked most of my career with water mediums on paper. I’ve always chosen paper because it has a quality and presence that is more unique than any other painting surface. It does not serve me as an alternative to canvas. Paper, in and of itself, is essential in the evolution of the final image; in fact, the way the paint blends and integrates with its cotton fibers reflects the gist of my vision. Layering transparent washes of color on paper can capture the sublime in nature; in that merging of materials there’s a chemistry that defines humanness. Here is where I believe I’ve made the most significant contribution to the painting arts. The subconscious holds the most fascination for me. I’m obsessed with the internal landscape as a universal theme that shows the vast spectrum of the mind. There we can sense the vagaries of a watery world shaded with instinct and emotion— those myriad scenes from the psyche rooted in symbols, like waves of faces or figures intertwining in the river of self and otherness. My paintings become veritable maps where persons might use them as points of reference, inspiration for that journey through hidden layers of the unconscious with the goal of a clearer understanding of themselves. Both water and paper live and breathe in symbiosis. I move them together, caress and provoke them... an improvisation that finally merges organically to spew images. But I need to give of myself first, pay homage to the water’s currents, that struggle between control and the freedom to allow her movement of its own accord. There lies the mystery of mark making— conceding to her flow, where in so doing she reveals the terrain of my own subconscious. By ‘organically’ I mean how water on paper creates multifaceted gestalts. We live in a fluid world; the physics of hydrodynamics is all pervading. There’s an organics of the natural world as well as the world of the psyche. Like every organ in our bodies, the brain, too, is shaped by water, and our most intimate life is the result of its action. We can say that our psychology is synonymous with the soul of water. My personal language of abstraction with water and paper captures the wordless— those archetypal forms, pockets of energy erupting with sensuality, and their flowing pools, like substance become living organs— my work shows the guts of our own psyches.