Artists Statement

 

“The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs.” — Heraclitus

 

My paintings and sculpture depict psychic or metaphysical dramas rather than events that take place in time and space. All of nature is in a constant state of transformation, an oscillation between creation and destruction. My characters and the stories they inhabit are metaphors of creativity and metamorphosis. All creation myths, including the big bang story, seem to begin with some primordial chaos from which all forms emerge. The artistic process is analogous to, and an expression of, this recurrent archetype of creativity. I paint and sculpt to discover and clarify forms and images intuited in the chaos of my psyche. The characters that appear are aspects of my persona and the spaces depicted are the rooms and landscapes in the theatre of my mind. The contents of this invented world appeals directly to the imagination of the viewer and to the vast storehouse of imagery we each carry with us—collective, historical and personal in nature. The mind of artist and viewer connect with the living, evolving collective human imagination, absorbing its history and creating its future.

 

It is important to me that the manner of representation emphasizes a quality of existing outside of time and in an indeterminate space, like a dream, myth or fable. I incorporate the forms artists have used for thousands of years—naturalistic, architectonic and geometric. My style and imagery fuses operatic and Baroque fantasy with archaic stylization but is delivered with a modern sense of humor, our defense against the absurd. The instinct to anthropomorphize a symbol or metaphor is powerful, and the human figure naturally dominates the historical vocabulary of the visual arts. Human anatomy is not essential to human representations. Buildings, decorative forms, tools, machines, animals, and plants can all represent the human—not merely the human appearance but the magnificent human mind—the shadow of the divine.