The canvas engages me and I engage its invitation. I begin exploring form, context, line, and color, and relationships begin to form and assert themselves. I feel their energy, take risks, and find a direction. Instinct versus critical judgment, two wary partners, interact and argue, and may start to cooperate
I experience the back and forth between discovering and stabilizing, between disarray and cohesion, and they find a place in me through my excitement and despair. I am hoping these antagonists find balance. Can l bring this painting to vibrancy, or will it disappoint and anger me? I rarely give up on it. The painting and I are are hitched. Through my lens, color ultimately carries the painting. Color, the transforming elixir. The painting then becomes its own thing, no longer part of me, living on its own. Strange. If I like and breathe deeply from it, I am grateful and happy.
Reflecting on context and meaning rather than painting per se, I don’t consciously depict political, social, cultural, or historical events, past or present. I separate myself from that daily immersion and its frightening aspects. My painting travels to a more internal private place I imagine or want to discover. I think about the planet I used to take for granted and now imperatively need to help save. I grieve privately about human greed and its need to dominate and exploit the “other”. I don’t try to paint a Guernica, or the Holocaust, or Pearl Harbor, or Troy, or Hiroshima or contemporary tragedies. Rather I seek harmony, and newness in small abstract paintings, and thank Matisse, de Kooning, Diebenkorn, Scully, and the many other wonderful abstract painters who set the path, inspired , and pointed the way.
