Artist Statement
As a young artist, I was fortunate to explore many mediums including sculpture, drawing, installation, printmaking, ceramics, and painting. My work has always traveled the spectrum between abstraction and representation. Abstract Expressionism, Japanese prints, Postmodernism, and the California Colorists are some of the disparate influences that have found their way into my idiosyncratic and cryptic lexicon. Artists that continue to influence my work include: sculptors Eva Hess, Kiki Smith, Robert Irwin, Andy Goldsworthy, Mona Hatoum, and Anish Kapoor; photographer Joel-Peter Witkin; painters John Singer Sergeant, Wayne Thiebaud, Willem de Kooning, Winslow Homer, Sandro Botticelli, Alice Neel, and Francis Bacon; and mixed media artists Robert Rauschenberg, Betye Saar, and Joseph Cornell.
My family of engineers, demonstrated to me what it meant to have an energetic response to materials and the creative process. In terms of my own desires and ambitions, when I was young I didn't especially see art making as being a part of my life, or at least as an integral part of my life. I enjoyed my youth, I enjoyed the usual things of growing up in Southern California - beaches, snow skiing, swimming - and didn't have a big picture of what it was that I wanted to become later in life. I never imagined this connection with the water, which I developed as a child, would later have a strong impact upon the type of art I would end up creating.
Over the course of many annual snorkeling trips, the vast amounts of plastic debris that I have seen washed up on shorelines have at times seemed endless. I continue to absorb the degree to which these plastics have become a scourge to our environment. Coral reefs that used to be teeming with marine life now lay fallow. No longer are the larger parrot fish seen with any frequency.
This medium, this debris, could supply an endless array of possibilities, but I had no means to collect and ship all the materials. Instead, I started making art out of the plastic and paper waste I generated in my studio and now incorporate wood reclaimed from the boat restoration shop below.
My larger abstract paintings are my most empathic, and though they are wholly abstract they remain firmly grounded in the figure. In other, smaller works, paint and other media embody the process of making whereby I deliberately leave apparent the possible mistakes, alterations and overpainting to reveal the intuitive manner in which the work comes into being. Drips and remnants of other processes give the impression that chance plays more than a passing role in my work. Then there are the landscapes; an expressed concern for color, texture and form encompassed in the ongoing practice of remaining loose. When the work is viewed as a whole, one is witness to the ebb and flow between reality and the recalled, a metaphor for my most painterly of concerns: how the synchronous colors reality.
My family of engineers, demonstrated to me what it meant to have an energetic response to materials and the creative process. In terms of my own desires and ambitions, when I was young I didn't especially see art making as being a part of my life, or at least as an integral part of my life. I enjoyed my youth, I enjoyed the usual things of growing up in Southern California - beaches, snow skiing, swimming - and didn't have a big picture of what it was that I wanted to become later in life. I never imagined this connection with the water, which I developed as a child, would later have a strong impact upon the type of art I would end up creating.
Over the course of many annual snorkeling trips, the vast amounts of plastic debris that I have seen washed up on shorelines have at times seemed endless. I continue to absorb the degree to which these plastics have become a scourge to our environment. Coral reefs that used to be teeming with marine life now lay fallow. No longer are the larger parrot fish seen with any frequency.
This medium, this debris, could supply an endless array of possibilities, but I had no means to collect and ship all the materials. Instead, I started making art out of the plastic and paper waste I generated in my studio and now incorporate wood reclaimed from the boat restoration shop below.
My larger abstract paintings are my most empathic, and though they are wholly abstract they remain firmly grounded in the figure. In other, smaller works, paint and other media embody the process of making whereby I deliberately leave apparent the possible mistakes, alterations and overpainting to reveal the intuitive manner in which the work comes into being. Drips and remnants of other processes give the impression that chance plays more than a passing role in my work. Then there are the landscapes; an expressed concern for color, texture and form encompassed in the ongoing practice of remaining loose. When the work is viewed as a whole, one is witness to the ebb and flow between reality and the recalled, a metaphor for my most painterly of concerns: how the synchronous colors reality.
