Artist's Statement

Over my thirty-five-year career as a painter, my subject matter, which began with the personal, has expanded in an outward trajectory to encompass architectural subjects, aerial landscapes, and images of the cosmos. I have always worked in the divide between realism and abstraction, encouraging their coexistence by focusing on space, color, and light.

At heart, I am an abstract painter, but intuitively I reference surfaces and patterns that exist in nature, both on micro and macro scales. By playing with color and shape, I make works that are familiar yet fantastical—I use patterns that exist organically in nature to create something entirely new.

My earlier work uses aerial imagery of earth as the starting point for abstraction. These bird's-eye landscapes reference the natural vocabulary of deltas, clouds, and mountain fissures to populate abstract compositions. The paintings become a means to study collisions of space as well as artificial and natural geometries.

In my recent work, as I direct my gaze skyward, I use celestial events as inspiration for "spacescapes": the congealing of nebulae, the colliding of particles, and the birth of stars. Now, as I explore the abstracted frontiers of the solar system, I ask the viewer to see the universe as an abstract, ever-moving pattern that continues beyond the borders of the painting surface. I use large, irregularly shaped canvases to encapsulate this imagery more organically, as bright, striking fragments. The dramatic asymmetrical trapezoids and indented triangles contain colorful fluid approximations of cosmic particles moving through time and space—attracting, creating, and destroying — just as color moves across the canvas during my painting process.