Forces of nature have always been themes in my work. Weather dominates landscape in the most seductive manner. It is nature at its most abstract - violent, serene, mysterious, and prosaic. It mirrors the changing emotional landscape within me. My practice in both the monoprints and paintings is to work with thinned pigments. I pour, sweep, brush, drip, and fling layers of paint. I coax pools of paint into translucent veils of color. Anchoring these ephemeral elements are tree limbs, water ripples, gestural marks, stripes, and blocks of color.
Recently, my paintings and prints have shifted from pure abstraction. I am rendering the fluidity of water and the gestural action of tree branches in combination with nonobjective brush strokes and layers of color as an examination of the difference between what’s real and unreal. These works mirror the relationship between my internal emotional dialog and the external landscape. The laborious process of carving the wood for a woodcut print, or rendering a tree limb, becomes a labor of love as it reenacts the original intimacy of experience. The woodcuts explore similarities of the woodgrain to the subtle gesture and geometry of water ripples, the branching trees to veins and arteries. Each image captures a single moment, while reflecting all moments.
