ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores social, political, and personal subjects, and starts from a sense that the world is inexhaustibly interesting. I combine perception and other visual sources with memory, imagination, and narrative, and I work back and forth between drawing, painting, printmaking, and writing. I find that an interdisciplinary practice sharpens my vision, illuminates unexpected facets of subjects, and generates new approaches and ideas.
I begin most projects with perceptual drawing and painting. I complete some works entirely onsite, often over many sessions. As I work at specific locations over time, visual scenes conflate with current issues and personal experience. Observation is a consistent spur to my curiosity and imagination, whether working onsite or in the studio. In the studio, I further explore perceptual images through variations of media, scale, emphasis, light, and color, as well as through further associations and invention.
One of my current projects is a graphic memoir on themes of disability, substance abuse, and creativity. In the work, I combine paintings, drawings, prints, and writing. A chapter from the project has been published in Rosebud magazine.
I believe that all art is fundamentally communicative and exists on a continuum. Along with creative work, teaching puts me into close contact with those essential aspects, as does writing about the work of other artists.