Artist Statement

In the dense, intricate spaces of my paintings, I intend to slow the velocity of one’s looking. The trance-like, elaborate patterns I hand-paint are repetitive, obsessive, and devotional. Subtle spatial shifts - the slippage between figure and ground, with color, surface, and scale shifts - contribute to the subject of veiling and unveiling, absence and presence. Light is revealed within a pattern as illumination and disappearance, like a flash of thought. A Buddhist might call it the nature of impermanence. These paintings are meditations on failed systems of perfection.

I seek a discourse on beauty, pleasure, sensuality, through the carrier of ornament and decoration. Using ornamental forms from various cultures which are symbolically (and often spiritually) encoded, I explore ideas of sameness and difference, harmony and discord, the human and the divine. Celtic knotwork, Japanese waves or clouds, and Islamic geometries based on stars and florettes embody entire cosmological and religious views. There may be further associations to textiles, webs, lace, and the feminine domain. The intimate spaces created evoke the hidden—of looking through to another world past a kind of screen, of forms materially dissolving and rhythmically in flux. In these rich and luminous surfaces, I hope to create an experience which vacillates between a sense of containment and wholeness and its fragile disruption.