ARTIST STATEMENT: I began painting abstractly from the first moment I picked up a brush. I immediately recognized it as a way of making the subtle ideas, perceptions and nuances of our interior life concrete. Ambiguity plays an important role in my painting. As in poetry or Zen, it serves as a means of working with the ephemeral or contradictory aspects of our experience that resist clear and direct statement. In addition, the physical qualities of painting are vital to my work.

To make my paintings, I employ forms that may bring to mind biological, cartographic, bodily or geological elements. I juxtapose them in silvery or latticed fields to create a web of possible associations and relationships that are both suggestive and subject to change. The images are at times obscure, even to me, and the paintings gestate for weeks or months—the products of a dynamic, contemplative process of drawing, composing, improvising and refining.

My process treats each painting as both object and image. I build up forms with heavy acrylic and alkyd mediums. The fields in which the forms lie are created with a combination of glazes, pours and skeins of liquid paint. Sometimes I use metallic paints, translucent gels or sand to enhance the physical and tactile complexity of a painting.