My work hovers between field trips into psychological, subconscious nether regions and re-telling and re-imaginings of history. Through intuitive spur-of-the-moment approaches to composition I make marks not knowing what their outcome will be. I use a state of not knowing to let marks playfully amalgamate into shapes that trigger associations, memories and imagination that I eventually process into content. It is important to me, though, that a transformation happens on the canvas.
Often my imagery teeters between abstraction and discernible representation, employing one to get to the other. I introduce remembered and associated forms from a childhood in Greece, Germany and Kentucky. I keep coming back to German and American history as well. Is it a fascination with warmongering menace? The writing on the wall of empire-building, a Police State perhaps? Maybe their contributions to culture and progressive technology? Probably all that and more. I am also an avid reader of fiction that expands on our world and takes me on a daydream journey. Most recently that has been short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. My seminal theoretical text is Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, a philosophy of imagination and daydreaming. Other painters I look at are Charline von Heyl and Amy Sillman, Peter Doig, Neo Rauch and Francisco Goya. |