artist statement

Each of the works presented here began as a preliminary painting, serving as the universe of raw material for the finished piece. The initial paintings were then cut, and their parts reassembled until a new gravity emerged to bind them in a particular way. To me, this process reflects the constant shifting and re-grouping of the elements of nature, but also represents the drive towards balance between the opposing forces of control and abandon.

I approach the original paintings in an uncontrolled way. The cutting of them often seems to release a palpable energy, and the fragments become like small pieces of wilderness (of nature, or of psyche). In reassembling them with increasing precision, I enjoy the transmuting of their essentially raw, wild qualities into a modest structure which is humanly graspable while, I hope, retaining something of the mysterious.

In this new joining of parts (colors, forms, lines) there is tension and fragility, but also an idea which, once formed, cannot be unformed. To me this is fundamentally the same as the ordering of sounds into music, or numbers into an equation; each piece represents one solution to a puzzle of self-expression.