Artist Statement
The origin of the shapes is the result of the combinations of visual experiences with our visible world, funneled through the subconscious in the act of automatic drawing to become accessible to the conscious mind for development and manipulation.
Although all of these paintings are three-dimensional objects, they are paintings not sculptures. The surfaces of the shapes are conceived as planes on which to draw with the brush using color. The three-dimensionality makes possible shifts of relationships and an openness of structure not attainable on a rectangular and flat surface plane alone. To make the paintings the shapes are cut from masonite (hardboard), edged with wood, and assembled using dowels, screws, metal braces and epoxy cement. The surfaces are gessoed before painting, and some shapes are textured using plaster. All are painted with acrylic colors. The painted constructions are untitled in order to avoid prescribing narrative suggestions for the viewer, and to emphasize that the content depends on formal relationships.
Non-Objective Painted Constructions
Making paintings in the 20th and 21st centuries has undergone a number of significant changes. The artists have developed ways of developing the imagery from representation to abstract to nonobjective. Some representational traditions continue. To use abstract imagery is to begin with visual appearances but to use them as a point of departure rather than to represent. To use nonobjective imagery is to make images that result from the manipulation of form rather than from “abstracting” from visual appearances. My paintings vary in the uses of images, but even where there may be vestiges of appearances, the intention is never only to represent.
The painted constructions do not tell narrative stories. Some of the shapes may suggest images familiar to the viewer, but the viewer is encouraged not to seek them. The shapes are “informed” by images in our visible world, but they do not “represent” any image. The viewer is encouraged to discern the underlying structure of the visual relationships because in them are embodied the experiences of living. There is tension yet balance, harmony and disharmony, movement and conflict, and humor, among other relationships and manifestations of experience.