ARTIST STATEMENT: OIL PAINTING AND DRAWING My work is driven by the “real time” energy of life and is made in direct response to my immediate environment. I often work back and forth between urban and natural subjects where the contrasts and cross-fertilizations are cumulative, non-linear, free flowing and interpretive. For me, drawing and painting parallel the act of seeing and are the most direct links to private time with the physical world. As I work, time slows down. My work becomes a record of place; through this process I reflect my inherent energy, spirit and purpose for living, while claiming a piece of this life as my own. Each work is executed in a single sitting. The paintings and drawings are not literal translations, but are intuitive expressions of places observed, considered and re-imagined. _____________________________________________________________________________ COLLAGE I am preoccupied with the problem of information; or its dual nature as nourishment and interference. We cannot live without information, but a surfeit of it can dissipate and dull the attention. In my collages I attempt to achieve a maximal synthesis of focus and disarray. The visual space is highly randomized and highly ordered. The play of visual coincidence creates pleasure, just as it keys us into the generative power of chaos. I want to push the visual matrix to a crescendo just before breakdown, to find, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, “The still point of the turning world.” There is a gamble involved in this, and my circular arrangements put me in mind of roulette wheels, just as they provide an insight into the spectral nature of consciousness.