Gesture:  I believe in the importance of the spontaneous gesture.  It is a gift of the body, and whether bold and sweeping, cramped or tangled, there is a message in all of it.  The message has meaning not yet assigned, waiting to be recognized and developed by the receptive spirit.

Color:  Color is a gift of the gods. From the strength and clarity of black and white to the dazzle and infinite dimension of pure color, its power and blessing should not be stinted.  Yet how much color can we absorb without being blinded?  Reduction and concentration can focus and paradoxically magnify color’s magic. 

Process: I have always been compelled by gesture, and after working in 2020 with large black calligraphic gesture on white canvas I began building dimension into the white ground with texture and darker underlayers. Color reappeared in my work, as I experimented replacing the black calligraphy with gestures of saturated color, or retaining the black gesture but flipping the ground to an intense single hue.

In 2021, on an older failed canvas of black-on-white, I tried some painted pieces of a translucent paper and was intrigued by the effect. I liked the delicacy, light transmission, and visual permeability of the translucency in contrast with the earthiness of the texture, all in interplay with organic line. And I liked the chance involved in spontaneous gesture and a random stack of colored shapes. 

Because I start with an improvisation and work with whatever comes from it, style and subject vary a lot in these collages, from the fully non-objective to an abstracted space that might include the symbolist or the figurative.  Ultimately, I want to be excited by the conversation I see going on within the frame – the dialogue among the pictorial elements.  I seek a musical dynamism that has both charm and charge and also a kind of truth I can’t get at any other way.