As an artist, I work everyday. Intuitive, and mostly a reflection of quiet, day-to-day events, sometimes interspersed with life’s larger issues, my paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures are seemingly of ordinary things created with a modesty of materials. The personal is somewhat embedded but not necessary espoused. One enters into the work as if seen through a microscope, becoming aware of a place much larger than it appears. Not unlike the Japanese art of the bonsai tree and suiseki rock, scale does not change the essence of my work when you look at it.

Each individual work represents a present-tense intuitive moment that leads from one piece to another, creating a thread that weaves throughout my various directions. What unifies bodies of work are common colors and content. With a background in sculpture, I see the similarity in forms not the differences. Working like someone in improvisational theatre, I need something to react to, even if I formulate it myself. Using an additive and subtractive process, I paint over things to make an atmospheric ground; it may be over a painting or a photograph that I or someone else created, glass or ceramics that I designed, or on existing architecture. I use this atmospheric ground as a created surface on which to expose new lines and shapes. By painting out the negative space, I make lines. By painting over the negative space, a new positive is formed. For me, it is as if the image is already there and I am recreating it — like the old Indian parable where the master tells the student who wants to make a beautiful stone sculpture of an elephant, “Fine. Here is some marble, a mallet, and a chisel. All you have to do now is carve away everything that does not look like a beautiful elephant.”

With a minimal palette of colors that are inherent in nature, I always return to white, yellow (gold), cerulean blue and pink, finding these colors peaceful as they mimic water, flowers, snow and sun; they are my variations of the primary colors, the building blocks of color. Each body of work has a net of associations established within a heuristic process that relies on memory and the familiar. My choice of what I represent as subject is somewhat enigmatic even to me. I continue to explore the representation of the tree. Growing up in an environment with extreme elements and four seasons, I see trees as markers of time representing both change and permanence. In addition to trees, other recent subjects have been flowers, faces, birds, elephants, dogs and boats, chosen not just for meaning but also for form. Like the person who reflects on a Zen koan, I ponder something other than the logical.