For many years, I’ve been curious and fascinated by the stain painting artwork of Helen Frankenthaler. One of the properties of that artwork that interested me very much was the raw canvas — those areas with no paint at all. That was the initial inspiration for this body of work; I wanted to make paintings that looked like they were done on raw canvas. With the exception of one painting, Yocemento, I also chose to try out acrylic paints, a new media for me. To begin, I painted the canvases the color of themselves — that raw beige — and then added in color moments. The color moments morphed into a mania and the works became a cacophony of color, shape and line. They are a huge departure from my usual works and they don’t make sense to me. I feel like I’ve painted deconstructed cartoons.
