When I was 8 years old I had a dream I was in a garden. I climbed this wall and realized that if I jumped over I would no longer have the protection of the garden and would be in the wilds. I jumped. It seems a life's choice. With painting it is an act of faith just to pick up the brush. Art is the wish, the prayer and the offering all in one.  

 Painting is a way to share the totality of what I've seen, touched and what has touched me. For me it is a process of loading it up and then emptying it out, gaining control and loosing it until I feel I’ve conversed with the painting. I paint “to see what I know not what I know.”

My paintings are a personal odyssey, a vehicle to carry me forward and find some deeper unity in what is happening in and around me. I believe the making of a painting needs that moment of epiphany and a trace of how the imagery conveyed thru paint was discovered and experienced by the artist. Not a graphic notation of the language of experience but the mystery of it. 

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In the late 80's there was a NYTimes photo of a bombing in Iraq, the people running were caught frozen in motion by the camera and it looked like modern dance, so composed. I've been trying ever since to make paintings that captures that; the horror and the beauty of violence. After 9/11 I seem to have figured it out somewhat. I think of Goya's late paintings of two men swinging cudgels at each other towering over yet rooted in the landscape and of Leon Golub's work about the nature of the world and our part in it. Yeats wrote about “ the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.”  I want somehow to comment on what we do to each other and even how we pit all life against itself. I do want to make something to live with though. The redemption from the horror of the image is in its joyful rendering and its lack of sentimentality. I am also exploring the range of subject matter my painting can encompass as I paint about those personal moments that are shared by all and speak to our everyday experiences. 

Since shifting from Abstraction, what I feel I have done these past few years is move my experiment in overt imagery from the initial seminal studies to complete paintings. At first, it was important to just see what was possible. I was in a new home and studio in a new part of town. It has been liberating. I’ve always felt good work was somewhat like a time machine. It opened up one’s past body of work to new interpretations and significance and claimed new territory for the future. I now have access to my own history with a renewed understanding of it’s original content and a deepening understanding of how these images can continue to speak for me in paint. As a mature artist I find I have this large vocabulary to draw from. Imagery found over a decade ago is now available and malleable once again. Even art history looks different to me as I see my concerns expressed in a whole new set of artists and old ‘friends’ offer new gifts. This is so exciting.

2011