Artist Statement

(formerly Creative Process)

For over ten years, painting for me has been a platform for exploring experiences, dreams and entities visually, including issues of consumer culture, relationships, spirituality, and politics.

In my current paintings, I am inspired by the internet platform as a way of investigating current events as well as the human condition as it relates to and is tightly interwoven with our inner, cyber, natural and urban landscapes. My paintings are a critique of as well as an assimilation and celebration of the multiplicity and disparate abundance of visual information often intended to side-track, seduce and/or sell something to the public. My work is based on the visual realm of popular and often infamous imagery that permeates our social consciousness through the media, especially the internet.

I simulate the internet environment through the depiction and layering of unrelated visual units, browser "windows" for dialogue, for information, designs and, of course, spam. I do realize that these "windows", when viewed simultaneously on the computer screen, become unified and challenge the viewer to filter, reject, respond to, or embrace the information. These dynamics inform and stimulate my work.

In my painting, via the exploration of the figure, color, texture and form, I express the tight bond and interdependency with our immediate and global community. The images often mirror my belief and understanding that globally, everything is interconnected in a sort of spiritual, political, and economic embrace. The energy behind my work is my profound love for the earth, the divine, and painting itself. I often borrow and appropriate images easily recognized symbols and motifs from many sources, including images derived from magazines, the media, art historical references as well as from the computer environment, especially those encountered through the on-line visual experience of "pop-up" windows and ads. Symbolically, the computer reference serves as a metaphor for information, education and the wide-array, almost overwhelmingly assortment of images that we as a twenty first-century culture are confronted with on a daily basis.

I understand that people around the globe are more connected to each other than ever before. Information, images, resources and money flow more quickly than ever. Goods and services produced in one part of the world are increasingly available in other parts. International communication is commonplace and instant. This phenomenon informs my work.

It is as if national borders did not exist. I feel free to explore information easily accessible to me. Images that inspire my work (such as from dreams, books, and immediate surroundings) are and may be overlapped or merged with images that may be found on the internet or on the "Ethnic-Food" aisle at the local supermarket. Varying entities and institutions, for better, yet often for worse, may become "one" and coexist as one entity. Although some pieces are visually more tranquil than others in the choice of colors or the lack of or surplus overlaying of imagery, I strive to communicate a timeless sense of inner and cosmic peace. I approach my work with a motivation stemming from a lingering preoccupation with the perplexities, anxieties and wonders that permeate our lives. Painting is my instrument for making sense of the world.

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