About My Art
Creating and viewing art serves the human survival instinct by developing our intuitive abilities. Using intuition, we instantly organize information residing in our subconscious into a coherent metaphor, a “big picture” that explains the world around us – alerting us to hidden dangers or leading us to unseen opportunities. I create art in order to sharpen my intuitive thinking and to communicate my intuitive knowledge to my viewers. My artwork is particularly about giving expression to my subconscious mind in an effort to find spiritual or psychological common ground with my viewers. I believe that while my conscious mind tends to involve itself with the rational particulars of my individual life, the themes that play in my subconscious mind are more holistic and universal in nature. I have found I am best able to access my subconscious either through the discipline of responding intuitively to the energy emanating from a nude human figure or by clearing my mind of all images in order to allow for improvisational abstract expression.
When drawing from a nude model, my goal is to reveal my own subconscious response to the honest, starkly human form before me. It’s important to me that a model be nude because inevitably clothing expresses the artifice of a particular personality, whereas I want to explore my feelings around a more archetypal human experience. The honesty of the model’s nudity requires that I be of equal honesty in revealing my response to it. I must empty my mind of all preconceptions and focus solely on the energy coming to me from the model until by impulse and without conscious direction I move my hand in response to whatever feeling is evoked in me.
When I work abstractly, I start with a perfectly balanced, blank canvas. Spontaneously I make a mark on it, which inevitably throws the piece out of balance. From that point on I work intuitively to bring my marks into balance with each other and the canvas. Sometimes a recognizable structure will insist on emerging, but my preference is to produce images that seem to insist they’re something, but don’t insist on being anything in particular. I think this latter outcome allows the viewers more prerogatives for their own engagement with the piece.
Technically I prefer the most direct means of making marks. I love to hold a piece of chalk or charcoal in my hand, and rarely do I use anything more technical than a pen or brush to create my visual images. My only conscious rule for organizing my marks is that each must respond somehow to the preceding mark. Without envisioning a goal, I subconsciously direct them mark by mark toward realizing a moment of exquisite, delicate harmony between all the elements at play in the piece, a moment when the piece feels at rest, when chaos and order find balance. By finding one of those all too often fleeting moments and allowing it to stand still, I hope to capture and share with the viewer something that, whether hopeful or sad, feels universally true of our shared human existence.