ARTIST'S STATEMENT.
As an abstract artist, my primary aim is to create paintings which are the visualization of emotional structures and processes. As a musician, I've always been drawn to abstract painting because, like music, it reduces specific objects and events to their universal elements: rhythm, movement, texture, color.

Using these elements, an abstract painting, like a symphony, elicits an emotional engagement through the strength of its composition, and this makes both mediums especially powerful at conveying the shifting of psychological states.

In my abstractions I've been particularly interested in the relationship between line and form (mass or object), a relationship that parallels those of our perceived world: movement and stillness, action and thought, dynamism and placidity. I choose my colors for their particular emotional content to reflect the shifting strengths of these elements within the world of the composition. Further, by positioning forms as emerging from or disappearing past the boundaries of the frame, I am visualizing their nature as an ongoing process and suggesting the difficulty of arresting the ever-shifting states of human thought and emotion.

Recently I've been placing a greater emphasis upon surface texture and the problem of integrating a highly textured mass into its surrounding negative space while still retaining the element of line. I am exploring this challenge in two realms: the action surface of drip acrylic and the tactile immediacy of paper collage. The trick in unifying this world of elements lies in keeping the negative space active - only a seeming contradiction, for that space is rich with potential for action. A strong form demands a strong space that asserts its presence either through moving into the form or by taking on the character (whether rough or soft) of the form itself. Emerging from the form, line is the intermediary, the dynamic action by which the form most obviously moves into and alters its space, its world. But the boundary of the form is porous, is the transitional space where the world may in turn enter its inhabitant, reflecting the reciprocity of their coexistence.

Abstraction is not allegory: it is not a one-to-one correspondence between the object in the virtual space of the canvas and its referent in the actual space of our lives. But we sense a deep morphic resonance between the compositions, colors and spaces on a canvas and the rhythms, moods, and conflicts of our lives, and it is to the increasingly rich visualization of this resonance that my work is committed.
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For more details about the art & artist, check out the "Artist Notes" (found under most of the works of art in the online fine art galleries).

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