Velvets: Life is Beautiful, Terrible, and Strange

Overlapping drippy lines, calligraphic gestures along a pristine warm surface. A meditative, dynamic language of shape, pausing for small moments of quiet amid the constant buzz.

My materials have been pared down to walnut ink and velvet. I gather walnuts on hikes in the woods and patiently make the ink in my studio. The rich brown of the walnut ink shifts and merges into golds, oranges, and blacks as the stroke melds with the sensuous texture of the velvet. The velvet Itself is a soft and textural white, with a slight tint of yellow, a color resembling ivory.

The process is intuitive: a dance between texture and line. The grain of the velvet provides an etched record of the energy the strokes leave behind. The marks, intersecting lines and curves, fill and create the environment..... a slowing down in a chaotic, rapidly changing world.

Reclaimed Signs: Random Order

A burst of sky-blue spray paint against a crumbling grey wall, a small piece of metal on the ground, the form of sans serif type on a street poster. I carve out a space for these fleeting visual impressions, keeping them from being buried by the clutter of mediated information, documenting the ephemeral.

Merging graffiti and street art techniques with more classic painting  materials in a  mash-up of high and low visual culture. I create a series of frames with intersecting lines, curves, spills and patterns, all layered in vibrant, eclectic ways. In accumulating these fragments, I synthesize the experience of walking at a fast pace down a city street, catching out of the corner of our eyes a myriad of visual stimuli. We don’t focus on them; they wash over us, indistinct and transitory. The work highlights, with still images, how quickly our eyes dart, what short attention spans we have, and how sometimes we pause for small moments of quiet. These paintings are the focused slowing down of an ever-changing world.