My work investigates the direct experience of painting—I self-experiment, I converse, I feel. What is happening as my energy combines with the paint and meets the energy of the canvas? What gestures are emerging? What am I seeing? How am I responding, recollecting, inventing, reinventing? Is memory clarifying into color and shape, framed by places of past and present? Where is my biology revealed in these features? Am I inside the wonder of paint for a moment?
About
In my early 20s, I studied art formally at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn NY, and at Arizona State University. Studying sculpture, I became curious about the functions played by art in society and vice versa. I faced into the question of trying to reconcile what I was seeing in the world—notably its vast social inequalities—with my own experiences.
For my senior thesis project, I choose to express my deep sadness and dismay that Nelson Mandella had been in jail in South Africa for my whole life. I created a sculpture installation that juxtaposed these two realities, side by side. (See below for more on this work). After engaging in political art projects for some years in San Francisco, I eventually turned away from the making of things and how they relate—and opted for working as a healthcare professional. Now, with a chunk of life behind me, I am returning to my roots in fine art, finding a renewed interest in the formal aspects of painting. The value of formalism is that it provides, me, the artist, with way of being in the world that incorporates the whole.
