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biography
The Black Paintings began this journey. Black gouache, a field of unmanifest potential, from which lights and forms emerged or let themselves be coaxed with a brush. In an almost Zen process, I learned to trust what was, to let the composition arrange itself. At first, only pearls, flickers and glimmers made their way to the surface. Then the images became more defined, more expressed. From the blackness sprouted butterflies, flowers, and other signifiers of manifestation and transition. The forms continued to become more elaborated and concrete, eventually flying off the canvas, out of the void, and into the world.
I call this recent work Flying Crooked. The path of the butterfly, the mathematician's random walk, the circuitous journey of Odysseus through the Aegean or Leopold Bloom through Dublin all take their eventful, seemingly erratic routes towards a goal that is governed by chance, yet inevitable. Tom Wudl, my mentor, had guided me to have faith in the process, to pay attention to what was unfolding on the canvas. And I noticed that the flowers, butterflies and birds were taking their own routes through my paintings, that in any number of ways the work found its own way.
The cycle attempts to resolve intention with random chance, the latent with the fully manifest, blackness with light, surface with dimensionality and the abstract with the figurative. The series' large-format, gouache pieces involve both 3-D elements and excavation, as well an occasional flash of color. Imagery that appears to cohere from the substratum is actually painted first, in full color, on materials that are applied to the canvas in reverse as collage.
I feel more facilitator than instigator, somehow uninvolved with narratives that take directions of their own, yet the process is very much my own. My odyssey through the arc of these paintings, my crooked flight, has been a reassessment of what it means to paint, or, for that matter, to be an artist. But the process has also shown me that, ultimately, all these questions — liminality vs. definition, art vs. craft, being credentialed by the academy or finding one's way as an outsider — are distractions from finding one's way home to the reality nested within the work.resume
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Press
- March 24, 2012
- · Moca Fresh Auction 2012
- July 25, 2011
- · Chain Letter Exhibition 2011 - Website
- · Chain Letter Exhibition 2011 - LA Weekly Article
- June 19, 2011
- · Neongrey Interview
- May 13, 2011
- · Peter Frank Haiku Reviews Huffington Post
- March 12, 2011
- · Opening Reception Flying Crooked '11
- March 10, 2011
- · Lois Lambert Gallery Reminder
- March 5, 2011
- · Artweek.LA
- March 1, 2011
- · Artillery Mag
- January 18, 2011
- · Lois Lambert Gallery
- January 7, 2011
- · Children's Action Network Holiday Party
