Quote:
“In my content, I am always obsessed with the tension and dialogue between abstraction and figuration. In my subject matter, there is always some sort of narrative running through the work… I think I’m always trying to find or create images of what lies between things, rather than the things themselves... Really though, the bottom line for me is that it’s all about the paint, the physical process.”
Artist’s Statement:
Complicated busy patterns and grids have always seduced me. Whether it’s patterns on fabric; patterns in nature (the way sunlight comes through leaves in a forest, or the leaves or the trees themselves; Vines growing up a fence); a hose casually thrown across a patio grid; or multiple shadows on someone’s face.
When I was a kid, I used to draw these trippy patterned drawings of what I saw on the insides of my eyelids when I closed my eyes, that I imagined were images of molecules. Those kinds of images have always come into my work, in one way or another, informing both my subject matter and content. The idea of everything constantly coming together and falling apart (whether visually or psychologically), and of the interconnectedness of everything at a molecular level, has always been at the center of the work. As I grew older, I began to practice mindfulness meditation, and had a realization that what I was experiencing through meditation was a large part of what my work was about. I think the constant back-and-forth between abstraction and figuration is a manifestation of that “flowing together“ experience.
As for my process: I often start in a concrete place, using photos I’ve taken or friends have given me, or from an archive of my grandmother’s photos. These images are a “jumping off“ place. I’m never sure in which direction a given image will take me. When not working from photos, I work from specific memories. For example, the flowers all reference a dress my mother made and wore throughout most of my childhood – this incredible mod mini dress, red, saturated color. I still have the dress, and it still shows up in my dreams, so I guess in some ways the flowers signify memories of, and/or memorials to, my mother (who died when I was 15).
Another example of repeating imagery from memories that has worked its way into my visual vocabulary is windows of one sort or another. Something else I drew many of as a child, often doing elaborate detailed drawings and paintings with figures inside boxes, inside other boxes, reminiscent of comic books, but always depicting various thresholds. I think these images are intrinsically bound up with my love of working two-dimensionally, as looking at a drawing or painting has always been for me like looking through a window (or in the case of my own work, often looking through one window and then through yet another window), into a scene that can never quite be accessed, whether looking out from in, or in from without.
Growing up largely raised by my European maternal grandparents (as my mother was sick), I was acutely psychologically aware of a feeling of existing on thresholds between cultures, of never feeling fully rooted in one place (or even in one time, given the generational distance). I think having spent half of my formative years in an extremely urban environment, and the other half in an extremely rural one added to this sensation of always “looking through windows” as well.
I’ve always been intrigued with the idea that a painting is a “world“ of sorts, but only one moment out of that world, and one that is purely subjective: even in the most hard-edged (nominally “objective“) painting, the artist made a decision to represent something this way, a purely present moment, but the viewer will always interpret it, at least partially, through their own individual lens. For me, the dynamic overlap of these viewpoints is part of what makes a painting seductive (along with of course the material itself).