About
After working for many years as an actor in New York and Los Angeles, I moved to the Southwest and traded the performing arts for the visual arts. The impulse to create art is unexplainable. It's become a true compulsion and a voyage of personal discovery.
My abstract works are process-driven and I usually begin by mark-making and laying down shapes, images and color fields. Once a satisfying series of marks is laid down, I add oil and cold wax, layering with texture and color. Areas of the painting can then be scraped back to reveal what's underneath. I like discovering these remnants of earlier marks and it allows the history of the painting's development to become visible. Color choices are initially negotiated intuitively. As the painting develops, and using a form of painterly logic that is intrinsic to the work, those choices become more and more analytical. If you look at your work long enough, it will tell you what to do.
My goal is to create something compelling. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes not. You love it, you hate it. . . you wonder how it's done; you want to look more closely at it or don't want to look at it at all. . . the ambiguous nature of seeing -- each viewer has his or her own instinctive response to an artwork. The ambiguous nature of art altogether -- for me, it's a combination of intuition and intention.
"An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by self-discovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint." -- Henri Matisse
"We shall not cease from exploration / And in the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time." -- T.S. Eliot