My training as a sculptor leads me toward large, industrial shapes, and layers of texture. I’m fascinated with the depth of three-dimensional forms on big canvasses, and how texture conceals and reveals, how it asks you to come closer, to touch it, to interact.

I often paint on several pieces at a time, in a series. For days I carry a painting around in my mind before I lay down a wash, sketch out a plan with charcoal or graphite, and block out the colors. Then I relax my self-imposed boundaries and give the painting its chance to speak. Have I missed something? It’s a delicate walk, directing the paint towards the idea in my mind vs. the organic creative process.

Acrylic paint is fluid and takes well to my aggressive strokes and the pure colors that communicate my voice. There’s immediacy to acrylics that bypasses my impatience with long drying times so I can apply the next layer as soon as possible.

I use painting, especially the meaning of colors, as a personal journal, another way to communicate my experience of everyday events. If I put aside my past conditioning, what do I really feel with red? Maybe it’s not “anger� at all. Which combination of texture, color, and composition defines the journey between co-joined realities such as hope and depression, or anger and love?

Painting allows me to have a dialogue with my viewer and myself. Is this gray area a true description of what I’m feeling? Does this black bring me closer to understanding my own mind, in this moment?

I want the paintings to speak to all the levels of love, of loss, of joy, and pain that we tend to avoid, the shadow moments that we sense and turn away from. When we limit the full range of our feelings, we limit our humanity. Even as I paint, I sense the undercurrent of my own experiences spilling onto the canvass, the fleeting, shadow moments I too avoid. Only when I see the finished painting do I sometimes understand what I am not always willing to look at.