A painting comes alive for me when I can feel the air in it. Suggestions of compression and restriction contrast with a sense of breaking free and soaring in thin air. Color is saturated; space is warped; lines are active and almost three-dimensional. I’m interested in the point where form takes on meaning—where a triangle can also be read as a road in perspective, for example. Each painting suggests a model or a diagram even as it evokes a particular, fictional space. Although I want my paintings to appear fresh and immediate, in fact they are generally long in the making and built out of thousands of revisions and morphing forms and ideas.
My painting responds to the changing environment around me, for example the view from my studio windows which overlook a skyline once populated by flocks of pigeons, now filled with condos. I layer diverse media including oil, acrylic, flashe, spray-paint and ink on canvas. Large paintings are as high as I can reach and orchestrate paths of movement and mark-making. They begin with a pour of paint, some lines, or a shape, and then I proceed in an approach of improvisation and response until a structure takes form. In addition to paintings on canvas, over the last ten years I have been making works on paper with handmade wasli, a recycled multi-ply paper from India. I tear off shards of paper and fill them in with paint and the torn shapes become sort of a trompe l’oeil collage. They float through a scaffolding of dry-brushed calligraphic ink lines and translucent stains.
My work takes part in an ongoing conversation with the work of a number of other artists who seek to explore abstract painting’s capaciousness and its ability to internalize an array of ideas and to speak to contemporary life even as it uses a vocabulary of bodily and emotional experience that short-circuits name-ability. I believe that even in a time when there is a great deal of pressure on art to respond directly to social and political events, painting can offer the possibility of reaching beyond the constraints of settled meaning to exemplify a kind of openness, freedom and critical thinking.