Statement
I've always made small collage studies, using cut up photographs and geometric scraps of painted paper to work through visual ideas. The scraps of paper are like stones for a stonemason: they tell me what to do and how to fit them together into cohesive, unified compositions. The resulting collages are both finished works in themselves, and studies that I translate into larger tempera and oil paintings.
In 2009 I began working on a series of large, sometimes surreal portraits; they depicted people whose faces expressed an essential quality or character that I wanted to capture. As the series evolved, I began to use models whose faces, made up as masks, became metaphor for revealing the true selves hidden behind social façades. An important element of the portraits was using gesture and color to express emotional and psychological states.
Recently, I started to re-introduce some of the geometric vocabulary and content from my earlier landscapes into my collage studies. I find myself working back and forth between portrait elements embedded in gestural paint, and more formal, geometric compositions.
The relationships between geometric forms in some of these new collages suggest dialogue or interaction between characters. In other compositions, I've drawn on fleeting memories of past scenes, producing images that contain subtle narratives hidden within formal structures. I've become a witness to the assertion of my own subconscious, caught up in a voyage of discovery and transition, as the variations between these approaches begin to define themselves.