I have an
attraction to realism and abstracted story lines. I look for how
surface patterns reveal structure. When I was four years old, I began
attending performances of New York City Ballet, and that made me
cognitively wired for the modern classicism of George Balanchine's
leotard ballets more than other kinds of dance. These frequent
experiences at State Theatre are my most powerful influence in setting
up my initial criteria for what is art. I think my fascination with
getting to a place in my painting where reality and extreme abstraction
become one and the same, such as the agitated water in Daycamp, and my
impulse to discard narrative detail (Joe on Ochre) was early on written
into my aesthetic .
I alternate between thinking very formally, such as how my fields of
color are affecting each other, as well as engaging in a hunt for the
patterns of nature's designs, and paying attention to my expressive
concerns. Color is exceedingly important to me. I spend a long time on
many of my paintings; one of the reasons for this is that the optical
magic I love requires a continuous re-balancing of cools, warms,
values, and hues before a sustainable sizzle happens - I am on a quest
for color that the eye doesn't tire of. It has been when I paint people
and bodies of water that the exploration of color and design has been
most thrilling to me. Water is very tantalizing to paint as the
structural pattern is often initially elusive.
Being so steeped in classicism from my earliest aesthetic experiences and
having reinforced that with a MFA from the New York Academy of Art, the
figure, when I paint it, rarely feels right unless I discard extraneous
detail. Until recently, this has been a barrier. I love expansive, gorgeous
art with crusty textures, as well as contemplative, austere works with
perfect color pitch. Some of my recent work exploring plant life, minerals,
gems, rocks, and other forms, feels like fertile ground for a junction
of body and environment. The outlandish gorgeousness and qualities of some
recent subject matter constitute the essence as much as with the figure
but also liberate me to form new conceptual models without the result being
cognitive dissonance. (Go tohttp://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile//14577.html
to view some of these works.)
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