Artist's Statement

I make paintings, prints, and drawings.  Imagery includes butterflies, hands, gold rings, landscape references, Christian subjects, self-portraits, circles and squares.  Form and color are combined with expressionist paint handling. Expressionism comes from a need for truth and the acknowledgement that growth comes from change and sometimes trauma.  If glossing things over is a lie (think of magazines and advertising), then Expressionism is the antithesis.  Some of my images are minimalist, focusing more on large areas of color and light rather than on marks.  Paint handling and surface are still important to these works, but are subdued.

  I am interested in getting closer to the mysterious, closer to the things we think and do not say, and to preverbal thoughts.  I am after what is intrinsic to the human condition, what can be sensed but is difficult to grasp.  I am interested in the temporal and the eternal.  I am interested in paintings functioning like poetry and prayer, without the words.  My paintings are objects for spiritual reflection and experience.  Their substance should be what they are; they are not pictures of something else.  They are objects embodying spiritual experience, icons.