The smell of oil paint mixed with turpentine is seductive.  Drag a loaded brush across a surface; color defines form and time passes with little awareness.   The physicality of painting is compelling, especially when it goes well.  For me, swimming is symbiotic to the materiality of painting and relative to its' space and time.  Immersion and coming up for air.  In my pool paintings the viewpoint is submerged like the swimmer, beneath the surface.   Movement causes reflections to behave in surprising ways. 

The notion of the Gaze  as directed toward a seductive form implicates painting as spectacle, like in theatre or sports.  Yet baseball  is associated with athleticism and virility.  Substituting stage for field, it is co-opted in my work.  Draped in red silk, this subliminal fetish is transformed using luminous layers of paint into a feminine erotic odalisque. 

The vanitas genre is also intended.  Baseballs in various states of decay remind us of our mortality as do flowers, burning candles, skulls and other symbolic objects within historical context of vanitas painting tradition.

Sunlight radiates through. Surface tension ripples between two environments, mirroring reality and intuition. 

In a portrait, is the person knowable by making a painting of someone or by studying the image captured by an artist?  If psyche is revealed, whose?  Perhaps the viewer supplies what glimpse of soul there may be. Art history is loaded with great portraits.  Elegance, angst, torture, subliminal beauty and humor.  Edgar Degas. Lucien Freud,   Oscar Kokoschka. Alice Neel, David Hockney, Susan Hauptman. David's Death of Marat is a most silent epic. The list is long and on it grows.

                                                          

Iconography  is embodied in our art and commerce, cultures and religions.  Hieroglyphics, allegorical symbol, pop icons, even road signs are emblematic and have been used with great imagination to enlighten and intimidate.  The prevalence of symbology on the web illustrates the continuing usefullness of  graphic communication.  One of my interests is recombining and twisting the meaning of ordinary objects and body parts, such as the hand, into contemporary signals.

The artist must write with erudition what their work  means.  Gumming up the works, impulses to drop beautiful words into the composition come as naturally as a kid in a candy store wanting to pop delicious candies into her mouth. Describing my process is like explaining my dreams.  It isn't simple.  Influences on my work have been many, some of which I am aware, latent others bubble up to the surface in due time.  Many artists say that they have no clear idea in mind when they begin to work, and that this is a good place to be.  Discovery is what makes it vital.

Jasper Johns was recently quoted in the NY Times “To me,” he said, “self-description is a calamity.”

With that said, here are some vagaries regarding my work.