Coming from a background in realistic painting, my art takes off from there.  When I have a blank canvas in front of me, the possibilities are endless. It could become anything, but realism has a way of soaking up other possibilities. I want to keep the painting “open” as long as possible before it moves to completion, extending the “becoming” phase, to have room to play, feel and discover.

I keep the channel of representationalism available, but there is no goal to finish with something that looks like a real place or thing.  Sometimes I have no plan at all and just let the paint and marks guide me, finding relationships and stories in the paint.

Other times, there is an idea, a drawing or a photo to use as a guide. The method is to play like a child, but with the knowledge of an experienced artist at my fingertips.  I bring a beginner’s mindset to the canvas, so that every work is a new beginning and a discovery.

I work in slow-drying acrylics, which allow lots of interaction with the colors as I brush, scrape and squeegee passages of broad gestures and small, intimate textures. The painting evolves organically. Often, I begin to see things in my marks, vision, characters, stories that appear the way they do in dreams. 

We don’t ask our dreams what they mean while we’re having them, but later, they may reveal meanings we didn’t imagine before.  In the same way, my images seem to come directly from the subconscious.  As in dreams, there is some relationship with things in my life.

I am often asked when a painting is finished. For me, it’s a sense of completeness, not perfection, but something else.  I can see that the parameters of the piece have closed and for better or worse, anything that gets added after that point takes away from the power of the painting.  That power is emotion.