Terrain: My Artist Statement

It seems customary in these statements to discuss how the artist's work represents them. But I'm not entirely comfortable with that convention, as I can't say just yet that my work represents me in any significant way. To borrow from literature, my paintings aren't so much personal narratives, as they're travelogues. Each piece is the souvenir — a remembrance — of a journey I took as I moved through a set of self-imposed constraints.

I rarely plan a painting, but prefer to build my paintings from individual parts and procedures — layer upon layer — hoping that the group of layers and disparate parts will, in the end, connect to form a diverse but coherent community. Separate pieces, but interconnected in some way. And it's within this framework of time and process that I find my freedom to explore motif.

In the course of developing the works for this show, I limited myself to a specific grouping of processes and parts. Processes distilled from my innate interest in the theories of city and community — how people find, maintain, and terminate emotional, societal, spiritual, familial, and physical bonds — and my boyish fascination with the visual artifacts of molecular science and astrophysics. A fascination tempered by process, by layering and response repeated over and over... by time. Thick paint strokes, textural events and personal mark-making represent my time spent with a piece. They mark my movements and emotional intervals. Soft, aggressive; periods of rest, periods of passionate engagement; a thrust of striking clarity... sometimes doubt and indecision.

I have found that my time spent in the process of painting is like traveling through rugged, mountainous terrain. Each outing is exhausting and leaves me physically and mentally depleted but on every peak I catch a distant glimmer of some larger place on the horizon — some place where I will find clarity. Until then my paintings are just relics of my travel, abandoned along the way.

And like any journey, I am thoroughly engaged in the moment and unconcerned with what the viewer will think. I return from the journey, and let the artifacts speak for themselves. Each viewer will experience my work in a way personal to them. I don't really want to interfere. I find my own significance in my work... Others bring their own story to the images. Let them find significance where they may.