ARTIST STATEMENT
In my work, I combine a Surrealist approach to content, with elements of Baroque composition and digital techniques to create dreamscapes. These are as much meditations on our desires and fears, as they are on drawing and its history.
On one level, my process is associative and intuitive. As I draw, I have in mind an inchoate theme, an imaginary place, and a feeling. An animal, a figure, or a shape calls forth another detail for reasons that are not always clear. Memories of images I have seen find their way onto the page, and these allusions coalesce into an open-ended narrative. As in the tradition of Magic Realism, mystery and foreboding mix with the seemingly impossible.
For the past ten years, I’ve turned primarily to 17th and 18th century European art and architecture in a quest to create images in which dynamic spaces, overarching movement, and strategically directed light breathe life into a scene and, at the fundamental level of composition, make it strangely real. Historically, what have been ways of creating a measured, unified pace? What spirals, lattices, and patterns can be used to generate the illusion of movement? Such questions have led me to explore geometry and perspective, and how these can be used to manipulate form in order to elicit specific effects, and, with the force of intention, transform a narrative that could be merely denotative into an experience.
Sometimes, I cannot resist taking an image apart, either to better understand its implications, to emphasize some aspect of its meaning, or simply as a game. In our digital world, pictures are increasingly experienced as fluid and unstable - endlessly reproduced, easily modified, and signifying something different with a change of context. Computer technology allows me to reproduce and transform my graphite drawings in ways that respond to how images are considered and perceived today.
In all these ways, I seek to weave together the past and the present, as well as the freely imagined with the rigorously analytic, so as to evoke an enigmatic world, shadowed by threats of dissolution, but illuminated by glimmers of redemptive wonder.