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WELTANSCHAUUNG
This body of work began with a series of sketches I did in the spirit of the Surrealist practice of "automatic" drawing, an intuitive and uncensored method of creative expression. After continuing to draw in this way for several weeks, repeated themes and imagery began to emerge and topics of personal concern revealed themselves. The major themes reflected in this work refer to the human condition and reflect my feelings and thoughts on such topics as war and aggression; poverty; consumerism; pollution; scientific and technological advancements; energy resource depletion; and our precarious relationship to nature and to each other.
The figures in my work represent all of mankind, and are for the most part, are presented with an ambiguity of gender for this reason. Within the same painting, I combine a mixture of line work and graphic treatment with areas that are highly rendered. This treatment symbolizes a world out of balance and in disharmony. The smooth substrate, curved edges, gentle floating relationship to the wall and Haiku titles reflect a delicate, soft spoken expression in juxtaposition to the disturbing content.
As I look at the human condition - in the past, over time and in the present - I question the direction in which we are headed. Through the journey of creating this body of work I have found myself experiencing some deep existential questioning. It is my sense that mother nature is on the verge of unleashing a powerful instructive blow if we fail to learn from our mistakes, take responsibility for our errors and do what is right for the earth and for each other. It seems we are living in concurrent dystopian and utopian times, and I am anxious about the ultimate balance between these scenarios. My artwork is an expression of the fragility of life and an anxiety born out of a creeping communal and personal sense of malaise - a whispered angst with a yearning for transformation.
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PORTRAIT SERIES
This body of work reflects my interest in human psychology and how one's exterior manifestations telegraph the workings of the inner being. The focus was on the face, a part of the body that has the most concentrated set of muscles in the body and is considered the most closely expressive of the personality and thought of an individual. My interest was in the gray areas of our psyches and how that can be represented in the physical body as a complex whole.
Each human story, each life lived, is a fascination to me. How can so many people inhabit the earth yet still be separate and unique individuals? It seems impossible, yet, it is true. Human behavior is fraught with mysteries, evidenced by the complex and changing equation of its parts: biological and physiological systems, environmental influences and the elusive definition of the spirit.
The next step of my investigation led me to explore how I could represent snapshots of immediate, coexisting emotion and thought. I created layered imagery by weaving together two separate paintings of different expressions. The weaving is a metaphor for the multiplicity and interconnectedness of our human emotions and thoughts. In addition, because half of each painting is hidden by virtue of the overlap of the weave, the woven painting also symbolizes hidden or little understood aspects of our individual natures.
As I continued along this path of exploration, I began rearranging the representational portrait through cutting and manipulating the canvas into a synthesized three dimensional portrait.
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