Artist Statement
I was taught to see wisely and marvel as a child. Critical in forming my design sense were multiple road and boat trips. When I was six years old my family drove in a small car from Massachusetts to Belize. The car window was my View-Master for looking 'out there'. I had only seen those south-of-the-border colors in my Crayola Crayon box and in Saturday morning cartoons. I questioned why people live differently from place to place. My images nestle contexts within contexts as a metaphor for paradox.
My prints have contrasting texture, value and line to interpret my visceral experience gazing at vistas within vistas whether they are near or far. My subjects come from pictures I take on walks, at friends’ homes, and trips. I'm interested in unusual forms, odd assemblages and beauty in nature. I use architecture, furnishings, geological features and plant forms to frame the subject. My practice combines abstraction and representation. I allow the formal qualities to have importance alongside representation to allow the viewer to engage kinesthetically with my imagery. Abstraction also allows me to infer ideas at the gut level and to make space for the viewer's own interpretations.
I come to printmaking as a painter. I make monotypes and monoprints using etching, silkscreen and linocut. Making marks via the intermediary yields more textural results while erasing some of my control. Printmaking is unpredictable. I like that my gestural expression is a dance between surprise and intention. Sometimes the results fail, but I accept that as a sign I’m daring to experiment. Using my hands to make work is an important aspect of how I create. I discovered how soothing handwork is while isolating during the pandemic. Printmaking requires more handwork than painting.
I'm walking hand in hand with forebears like Gauguin and contemporaries like Andrew Millar who combine representation with internal meaning. While gazing on the external I meditate on internal questions of isolation, displacement, acceptance that come from divorce, loss of home, loss of communal family life. I carry forward the pressing strokes of Joan Mitchell's expressive abstraction to release grief and fear or joy and amazement. Nature's forms have become more important in my work in the most recent years as global warming is accelerating. Already I am wistful over the natural world and wondering how long it will even exist. I merge expressive marks with the subjects I find visually striking with poetic meaning.
Lines came into my work from learning shorthand in secretarial school and from seeing linework in Indigenous culture of the Americas and Australia while living abroad. I'm inspired by the ceremonial and spiritual meaning behind indigenous craft. My line defines forms, but also infers supernatural presence. The lines might slowly finger walk around shapes or rush briskly across the picture plane. Cutting stencils, incising with tools and acid, dragging toothpicks and cotton swabs across ink are how I make lines. My eyes look inward to my dilemmas while my hands wipe and rake the surface in response.
