I've always loved the decorative arts and try to bring a bit of that to my artwork. The language of decoration is fascinating and
empowering - a path to memories, cultural habits, family, friends, and community rituals. I explore decorative traditions in my painting and ceramics while striving for a modern
energy and edge.
I'm especially inspired by plant structures that exist just underneath the ground - roots and rhizomes - and vines, their counterparts reaching through the surface and creating a tangled profusion of lines. These structures also serve as metaphors for my life - loss, memories, temporary hierarchies and branching constants. I'm fascinated by magic realism, the jittery conflict I see between abstraction and realism, and the simplified geometries imposed on the world by humans - bridges, buildings, frames, etc. - and the complex and "wild" geometry we think nature imposes on us.
"I've never understood the conflict between abstraction and naturalism. Since all paintings are inherently abstract to begin with there doesn't seem to be an argument there." - Milton Glaser
"Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away–an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains." - Carl Jung