Statement
Painting is a primordial and ancient form of communication. The elemental materials used in prehistoric paintings - pigments, oil, and water - are still being used today. A painting consists of a language system designed by the artist using various modes of instinctual sensory expression. This visual and tactile expression is then experienced by the viewer through instinctual sensory perception. Both the modality of communication and the medium are two aspects of painting enabling a piece of artwork from an earlier time period to resonate in a later time period; reasons why a cave painting made 35,000 years ago still speaks to us today.
The viewer’s experience is based on the language the artwork generates within his/herself, through the physical experience of seeing the tactile image, creating a conversation of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual interactions in the viewer’s consciousness. The language initiated by the artist is transferred to the viewer - a conversation not only with the artist, but one the viewer has with his/herself apart from the artist - forming a new language based on the personal paradigm of the viewer.
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An artist creates this system of language over a period of time, with his/her hands. A painting transfers a time based, creative, personal, and communicative experience into a condensed, immediate, visual experience. The language leaves a definitive, time-restricted state.
If a work can embody a form of beauty as well as a form of ugliness, a form of angst as well as a form of calm, a form of chaos as well as one of order, if it can hold the contradictions that accompany life, it can affect the viewers’ experience to be one of holistic conversation within themselves based on areas of universal human experience.
My work deals with the visual language contained within a created object – a painting which functions as a tactile image constructed of physical material with suggestions of depth and flatness, using various pictorial constructions originating from a reaction of how we see and experience real space, objects, matter, and life, under the influence of time.
I approach painting as a self-contained language system using polysemic image suggestions, creating fluctuating events of pareidolia within the viewer’s consciousness. I am interested in painting as a mode of communication that transverses time, cultures, and fixed languages - as a sensory-communicative experience between artist and viewer.
My work can be described as a combination of several methods of painting, incorporating different ideas, frameworks, and strategies. I focus on the expressiveness and possibilities contained in the materials of paint and pictorial construction. My latest work incorporates images and ideas derived from retail interiors, Caribbean beaches, fashion, CT scans, medical photographs, passages from paintings by Giotto, Masaccio, Enguerrand Quarton, and Fra Angelico, segments from my previous work, as well as photos from my daily life.