Artist Statement I once wanted to write fiction but although I had the words I couldn't seem to make anything up. After I gave up writing, I discovered that my imagination could go wild as long as I left words out of it.

 

The journey to blanking verbal input has been anything but easy.  At first I concentrated on chores where words had no special emotional content. Draw what you see, not what you know, lines, angles, cubes and cones; then composition - golden triangles and perspective, symmetry and its reverse. Finally color - what do different lights do to color and what do the pigments do to each other?

 

My struggle to achieve verbal blankness will never be over, but when I finally braved the color world I was able to begin thinking about what I actually wanted to paint. I now teeter quite happily between abstraction and realism. For me the best (that is, easiest) way to find a good balance is again through direct observation; I have come full circle to blind contour drawing. I don't know how or why it works. But in order to transform "real life" into an expressive, imaginative painting that I like, I prefer to look hard at the real thing or if necessary a photograph. Or, I can close my eyes and focus on a memory. I believe that watching the thing beats watching my hand or the canvas.  When I finally "peek" at my distorted shapes on the canvas I can travel again toward resolution of an actual painting.