Artist's Philosophy
I am interested in formal composition, rhythm, movement, and in the articulation of textures.
There are objects, fields, lines, and substances in each painting. I pay attention to how they play with each other, how they relate, what kind of organization they create when I look at the painting as a whole. I want each painting to express the same sort of combination of movements, phrases, and voices that a piece of music has. I want each work to give me the same sort of feeling of space and structure that I sense in an environment I would love to live in: it is a blueprint of that house, or a plan for an imagined landscape, or a map of a dense, lively city, or simply a space I happen to amble along and feel engaged in.
The paint itself, and the other materials I use, each have sensuous qualities--visual qualities that are almost like the feeling of touching wool, or a stone, or a piece of tofu. These are textures. The way they all mix together, how much space or density there is, is also a texture. So textures, like composition itself, are perceivable at multiple levels of attention, from the overall relationship between the handmade paper I use and what I put on it, to what can be seen in a single square centimeter of surface.
I do not try to make a painting tell a story. Instead I find that the design, in its surfaces, variations, and complexities, reveals a juxtaposition of my dreams and memories. Dreams are the product of ambiguous fantasies which form some lyrical shape and are imbued with feeling. Memories contain concrete historic elements. It is both the ambiguous and the concrete that I try to capture, that I want to offer to curious others to see. I wish to make present a poetic geometry that transcends the individual elements I use.
There are objects, fields, lines, and substances in each painting. I pay attention to how they play with each other, how they relate, what kind of organization they create when I look at the painting as a whole. I want each painting to express the same sort of combination of movements, phrases, and voices that a piece of music has. I want each work to give me the same sort of feeling of space and structure that I sense in an environment I would love to live in: it is a blueprint of that house, or a plan for an imagined landscape, or a map of a dense, lively city, or simply a space I happen to amble along and feel engaged in.
The paint itself, and the other materials I use, each have sensuous qualities--visual qualities that are almost like the feeling of touching wool, or a stone, or a piece of tofu. These are textures. The way they all mix together, how much space or density there is, is also a texture. So textures, like composition itself, are perceivable at multiple levels of attention, from the overall relationship between the handmade paper I use and what I put on it, to what can be seen in a single square centimeter of surface.
I do not try to make a painting tell a story. Instead I find that the design, in its surfaces, variations, and complexities, reveals a juxtaposition of my dreams and memories. Dreams are the product of ambiguous fantasies which form some lyrical shape and are imbued with feeling. Memories contain concrete historic elements. It is both the ambiguous and the concrete that I try to capture, that I want to offer to curious others to see. I wish to make present a poetic geometry that transcends the individual elements I use.