Artist’s statement
Whether in the form of paintings, prints or drawings/gouaches, my work always centers on the use of the human body as an expressive tool. This is a natural extension of my skills as someone who has both studied and taught figure drawing for many years, but also underlies humanistic themes in my content, which often address such ideas as power imbalances, relationships and our existence in nature. Thus the structure of the body serves as the building block of my compositions, and even my landscapes are conceptualized in terms of bodies or body parts, as in many early creation myths, with clouds, for instance, acting as a kind of Greek Chorus to the figurative narrative.
Most recently, in response to global events, I have begun a series about dictators, in both paint and print. By portraying historical dictators in various states of being – including in death – I seek to understand and analyze the characterology and dynamics of people who exercised such enormous control over the life and death of so many.
For me, then, every painting, print and drawing is an essential means of emotionally and intellectually understanding the confusion and tragedy of the world via narrative re-telling, or, visually speaking, a re-composing. And if that re-telling has poetic rhythm, and compelling figures in which we can see ourselves and our own foibles, catharsis can be achieved. It’s an idea that again, goes back to classical art and poetry and centuries old stories of creation.