ON PAINTING:
I make large color-motivated paintings that are like places you can walk into..or smaller ones that provide a glimpse of some specific territory. At the same time my paintings are simply about paint and its luscious qualities. A painting is a story told visually, and the malleable, deep, oily substance allows me to dig in to find and tell this story. In general, I start with a desire to use a particular color or to break up space and make marks on a surface, and the painting grows from there. While pushing paint around, laying color next to color, I both forget myself and sink in to my personal history; I am in the moment, but attended by all that has gone before.
As I work with the paint and brushes, I'm arranging a view. It's a true collaboration, though; the paint sometimes leads me around by the nose, but I have the final say about how the canvas will look. I work until a specific location or issue becomes manifest in the painting. On some level the purpose of a painting or any work of art is to share the artist's view of things and to prove she exists. For the painter, painting is a partner in revealing meaning, reveling in beauty, locating one's place in the world. For the viewer, paintings are a place to visit, react, reflect.
ON COLLAGE/MIXED MEDIA:
I go back and forth between painting and collage/mixed media. Collage offers a respite from the intensity of painting where you make something out of nothing. It allows me to free associate and follow the obsessive urge to arrange. I gather the appealing, charged-with-meaning flotsam of the world around me and recapture it in another way, to create visual treats and fleeting messages, sometimes humorous, sometimes romantic, and at times a reflection on society.