Bodies of Knowledge, Reflections on a Convulsive Time
a remembering in the body
After studying the figure for years, I made a deliberate choice to pursue abstraction. I was at a breaking point, searching for deeper meaning in visual language. After reading Itten’s The Art of Color on the psychology of color, I decided to drop constraints of representation and structure, allowing color to speak first in advising me how to render form, texture, and edges in relationship to other colors. It was the beginning of learning how to communicate life through the language of color.
I begin my painting process with no end in mind – that is, no final image. The action of painting is a dance with the canvas surface – the brush slithers and drops, barely catching, pressing, tapping, slapping, scraping…the soft brushy dilution of form into space, or the slicing imposition of a palette knife with a complex tangle of color.
The end result merges ideas and relationships – the inner and outer landscape – bending form into formless, and tuning color into emotion like a tuning fork. In the presence of painting there’s a synthesis of life’s experience.