The compelling motivations in my work are about how to navigate the human experience of constant change and transformation while finding home in the world of form. In a time of migratory reality, materialism, excess and disconnection, I question how visual language might serve to [re]establish balance and cultivate compassion. My creative process grows out of the need to create a language for navigation.
My belief in the power of connecting to nature as a way to shape society fuels my ongoing research, where I aim to discover-through drawing, painting and social practice- how to promote sustainability, preservation and appreciation for the natural environment. A lifelong study of Yoga informs and is informed by all I do. At the heart of my life and work is the practice of awareness and humility in the face of nature’s omnipresent power. How can the relationships of scale, shape, color, space and form in visual language awaken in the viewer/participant a recollection of his or her inherent interconnectedness and dependence on nature? Extended looking and suspended thinking is a means to discover things that might otherwise go unnoticed.
I believe in the cumulative effects of small actions, gestures, marks, movements and moments in life. I carry a sketchbook and camera with me at all times, engaging in the world around me and meticulously exploring compositional strategies. My practice involves immersing myself in nature. It is a constant experience of awe and wonder. Like an explorer on the search to discover new vocabulary for the language of navigation I make hundreds of drawings and paintings. These small and intimate formats are like a portable catalog of reminders of sources of nourishment, nature, and our collective home, planet Earth. My appreciation grows beyond the confines of the format. Through larger scale works, sometimes extending across many panels, individual and collaborative works express the need to expand awareness.
Having lived in Rome for several years, the aesthetic influences of my work owe much to Italian art and the European landscape tradition. My work is equally rooted in the Bay Area movement and contemporary landscape painting. I attempt to reconcile the abstract nature of painting with its representational role while maintaining the emotive impetus for the subject. My visual choices explore how form embodies space and my own relationship to actual and pictorial space. Both cultivated as well as natural spaces provide the visual and experiential framework for investigation. Rather than a specific geographic location, my subject choices are generalized and aim to elicit a personal recollection of experience in the world.
The very act of making and viewing perceptually based painting of the natural world invites discourse on our own ability to have meaningful connections, even a sublime experience of nature. As I continue to work in and with nature, I think about Henry David Thoreau’s words, “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”
My belief in the power of connecting to nature as a way to shape society fuels my ongoing research, where I aim to discover-through drawing, painting and social practice- how to promote sustainability, preservation and appreciation for the natural environment. A lifelong study of Yoga informs and is informed by all I do. At the heart of my life and work is the practice of awareness and humility in the face of nature’s omnipresent power. How can the relationships of scale, shape, color, space and form in visual language awaken in the viewer/participant a recollection of his or her inherent interconnectedness and dependence on nature? Extended looking and suspended thinking is a means to discover things that might otherwise go unnoticed.
I believe in the cumulative effects of small actions, gestures, marks, movements and moments in life. I carry a sketchbook and camera with me at all times, engaging in the world around me and meticulously exploring compositional strategies. My practice involves immersing myself in nature. It is a constant experience of awe and wonder. Like an explorer on the search to discover new vocabulary for the language of navigation I make hundreds of drawings and paintings. These small and intimate formats are like a portable catalog of reminders of sources of nourishment, nature, and our collective home, planet Earth. My appreciation grows beyond the confines of the format. Through larger scale works, sometimes extending across many panels, individual and collaborative works express the need to expand awareness.
Having lived in Rome for several years, the aesthetic influences of my work owe much to Italian art and the European landscape tradition. My work is equally rooted in the Bay Area movement and contemporary landscape painting. I attempt to reconcile the abstract nature of painting with its representational role while maintaining the emotive impetus for the subject. My visual choices explore how form embodies space and my own relationship to actual and pictorial space. Both cultivated as well as natural spaces provide the visual and experiential framework for investigation. Rather than a specific geographic location, my subject choices are generalized and aim to elicit a personal recollection of experience in the world.
The very act of making and viewing perceptually based painting of the natural world invites discourse on our own ability to have meaningful connections, even a sublime experience of nature. As I continue to work in and with nature, I think about Henry David Thoreau’s words, “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”