Poems in an Unfamiliar Language
I have long been interested in collections and classification. My current paintings are themselves collections of a kind. They gather imagery derived from the worlds of nature and of art to create a painted collage that suggests a poetic narrative neither linear nor concrete. I start each painting with an overarching concept which is wide and deep, with historical and cultural resonances. Some recent concepts I have chosen as points of departure are Migrations, Liminality, and East/West. I use an inflected grid as my formal organization. It allows me to employ a kind of abstract and flattened matrix for the painting. The grid is an element of modernist composition, and it satisfies my attraction to shallow space in a painting.
The source imagery includes landscape recorded by me and borrowed from paintings, I often photograph skies, reflections, and textures. My work embraces reference to the history of art and design to suggest the resonance of cultural memory. I also use natural history: plants, animals, and rocks partly because they evoke for me our long search to explain the world through classifying and displaying its wonders, and partly because of the long-intertwined history of nature in fine art and decorative arts.
