Artist Statement

I’ve said this before, that visual art is simply another medium I use to to explore – and discuss – ideas. Art is a language. Like any other language it can be used in a number of ways, elevated and base. But its highest use is illumination. Art is important and memorable and persistent when it brings to light new understandings, whether personal, or universal.

My most meaningful art records a process of learning, or a struggle to understand. It encodes the quest and the resolution, the journey and the epiphany. When I draw I am extending and refining my sense of touch, but also my awareness, conversance, appreciation, consciousness, recognition, enlightenment, and memory. The experience is all the more deep and breathless when I draw a portrait, as I discover a person, every mark on the paper an interrogating caress. In making paper landscapes I am learning how to paint, learning how to see, learning how to realize/reveal/convey the passion and sense I felt in those settings. My assemblages and sculptures investigate selfhood, alone and in relation to others, and are embodied with memory. I feel as I search and remember, and as I create. In my best art these coincident emotions are integral to the work, built into it, and in the end, they animate it.

I use so many different tools and techniques to create my art that it isn’t self-similar. The ideas I investigate are unique and disparate, each requiring its own material and fashioning, each outcome having its own particular meaning. Some of my pieces fall into series, but these taken together reveal a singular search. When I reach understanding I move on. My work isn’t about technique, either. I could never endlessly turn out variations on a theme in a certained style – I’d get bored. I am compelled to make art because I have something to learn, something (new) to say.

For these reasons my work isn’t repetitive, and so it is unrecognizable and unattributable. It isn’t decorative, either. All to mean my art isn’t salable. Collectors want the art they buy to stay in favor, to be permanent, identifiable, certain. So that it holds its monetary value, and status-conferring power. Ephemeral, quixotic, investigative work can’t satisfy those needs.
I don’t mind. I am about something else.

True art illuminates. It is, like knowledge, “The wing wherewith we fly to heaven“ (William Shakespeare) and “An unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty” (Jacob Bronowski).