Throughout my career, color has been the main vehicle for expressing content. I am interested in the aesthetics of color and color’s potential for communicating the intangible. I paint intuitively, guided by dynamic interrelationships of color to space and shape; and by experience, place and time. My vibrant palette is influenced by years of living on a Caribbean island, where the light is intense and colors are used with abandon.
The Paradise Project is my ongoing body of paintings divided into three groups:
THE MONOCHROMES are made from multiple paint layers of a single hue, with subtle nuances- uneven ridges, shapes or patterns left during the application process, or in the medium as it dries; areas of thick and thin paint; and varying degrees of color saturation.
THE SHAPES are comprised of schematic color contrasts forming lines, blobs, squares and biomorphic shapes. My brushwork is informal, as evident in the uneven edges and drips. Positive and negative space, figure and ground, are equally resonant.
THE BLOCK PAINTINGS are composed from small monochrome paintings attached to larger painted panels with cradled sides. As three-dimensional works, the Block Paintings are rather like sculptures- blocks of lush, vibrant hues.
In each of these groups, either the painting is an image (The Monochromes); it contains an image (The Shapes); or both (The Block Paintings).
Titles are critical to my work. I use surf terminology and tropical references as metaphors to elicit a guided response, thereby establishing connections between art and viewer, triggering associations and connotations. I view titles as an opening to further thought processes about the work.
Informed by cultural elements, personal experiences and visual stimuli, my art is referential, alluding to escapism, isolation, perception, and longing.
Creative expression is the poetry of life- a record of one’s dedication, obsession, meditation and reason.
