Artist’s Statement

Painting is my practice. I go to my studio to look for answers to my own private visual questions.

I am fascinated by all paintings as visual representations of culture. My memory bank of paintings forms the subject matter of my own work. My paintings involve examining the visual (spatial) and conceptual construction of the field of painting itself. The way paint has been applied - flat through volume, using symbolism, abstraction, realism….. - every ‘way’ of creating a painting seems viable to me. This idea is the reason why my paintings contain snatches of pure paint, non referential shapes, alongside rendered forms and shapes from historical paintings.

The paintings: I investigate ways to make disparate elements such as gestural brushstrokes, rendered drapery, architectural shapes, abstract shapes, flatness and volume from within the world of painting, come together in one place to create meaning (this is what I strive for in every painting - visual unity from diverse parts of art history). I think of my paintings as containing visual elements that don’t naturally belong together. The icons and visual scraps of information that I incorporate come from different times and places in art. My job is to show commonality - as if each element, wherever it came from can find a home in a painting of mine next to another disparate element. Rendering drapery (a constant in all my work) demonstrates the ability of paint to create the illusion of incredible 3D space, it represents diverse times and places depending on what my source images are (for example, the flat symbolism of a Byzantine miniature or the volumetric realism of a neo-classical Ingres painting).

All paintings are painted……. Every image painted anywhere in any time and place in the world involves the same procedures of placing brush strokes on a surface. I feel compelled when I’m painting an illusionistic or representational element to let the realistic image dissolve into abstraction or to reveal drawing that might exist beneath the illusion. Whatever the painting depicts - be it flat shapes or photorealistic images, for me it’s the same.