Concentrating on abstract artistic elements (color, shape, line, texture, composition, space, etc.), my content emerges without any special effort. I play with symbols and how we "read" them and make meaning from them. My works explore space: both actual, physical space and the illusion of space. Juxtapositions and relationships are core to my art (letters and trees together in a landscape?). I also love to create beauty.
The letters/landscape/faux encaustic series is my current focus. The basis of this work is a more or less abstract landscape-type space and imagery. A variety of trees that I have photographed combine with various letter and number forms – handwriting exercises using the Roman alphabet, calligraphy of the Cyrillic alphabet, stenciled letters and numbers, etc – to both create and negate spatial illusions. The letters and trees are both simply symbols, as are the paint strokes, drawing marks, acrylic textures, colors, and bits of collaged paper. How do we read them?
These works are often mistaken for encaustic, but they are completely acrylic, no wax is used. Hence, the acrylic faux encaustic label. It is basically a collage process, done in layers, and includes painting and drawing where the work invites it.
This series evolved from a spontaneous and unconscious convergence of several experimental directions, and it is only after the creation and exhibition of the works that I began to understand what they might be about. Basically, I am intrigued with how we "read" various symbol systems, and how we add and/or subtract in order to make sense of what we see. Humans will work to create meaning from what is presented.
In playing with both actual space (thick layers of transparent acrylic) and the illusion of space, my work combines the traditional idea of art as a window on the world with the modern idea of art being about the two dimensional reality of the materials, surfaces, and the hand of the artist. Letters and trees create or negate space due to a manipulation of size, position, direction, color, chroma and value, as do the paint strokes, drawing marks, acrylic textures and collage elements.
A few of these works contain musical notation; most do not. In the beginning, when I had never used it, viewers often told me that they loved my use of music, and this puzzled me. My guess is that the lyrical qualities of the landscape imagery are echoed by the lyrical qualities of the letters and numbers. The trees and letters and other elements set up repetitions and intervals that create rhythms. Viewers were feeling music! So, I began to include it along with the letters and numbers.
A visitor to a solo show of this series in August 2009 expressed it better than I can:
"I stepped through the door and felt my jaw drop…. The impact of everything taken together was just beautiful to behold.
Then, I walked up to and away from all the pieces and there was interest and involvement with all of them no matter where I stood
in the room, up close, far away, from the side - I was always engaged and entranced, mesmerized actually. I loved the way the
calmness and simplicity from afar became complex and detailed up close. There wasn’t a thing I would add or take away. Every
piece was serene yet complex and the show itself did the same thing. It was all totally complete and I just loved being surrounded
by the work and in that space."