PAINTING AND DRAWING

My interest in the images and meanings of symbols, the marks that have become language and the ground that holds them, inspires me to search into the visual and verbal images that are articulations of our contemporary culture. It is through words and images that voice is given and heard on both an individual and cultural level. It is also through these articulations that the personal and the universal are connected, expressed, and understood.

This intellectual and creative inquiry has enhanced my exploration of images, forms, and symbols as they appear in my paintings, metaphors as they emerge in my writing, and the investigation of the boundaries, differences, and similarities between them. This I do with paint and drawing materials, as writings in paintings, and as visual images in writings.

The paintings address life in its inception, continuation, and completion. The value and importance of all life from the smallest bug, creature, cell or plant to the human being is celebrated as beautiful and significant. The story it tells becomes a narrative that is revealed as marks and images, as an articulation of a person (myself) in communication with others and my environment.

My paintings and drawings explore texture and ground that give the feeling of depth of surface as is reminiscent of earth formations. Symbols, forms, and colors that appear as integral and emerging are superimposed and buried into the surface.

This build up of the canvas support with dry pigment, Plaster of Paris, sand, paper, acrylic media, oil paint, wax, metal shavings, charcoal, and whatever else works, gives a texture that integrates the image. These portray time, earth, living organic forms and characters.