process

Fresh Everything (detail)My work is made by a combination of drawing, painting and printmaking processes including silkscreen and intaglio (drypoint, etching). There is always an attempt to draw as direct a connection as possible between the internal world and the natural environment. This is done through an intentionally limited vocabulary of lines, circles, ellipses, etc., which suggests the various stages of convergence and divergence in natural relationships and cycles.

Memory plays a part in these cycles and in its randomness can encourage many strange and curious connections. I have been conscious of making a space for this in my work. Miniature scenes and objects float amid the larger composition, breaking it up and triggering further associations. The work is meant to be both vast and intimate, macroscopic and microscopic: imaginary flowers; blooms wrested from dreams; ancient fears (how do you draw these?); floating utensils and other implements, not to mention a good measure of nonsense.

In work such as Fresh Everything, Blood Caps and Green Stations, I explored the idea of alternate vocabularies: how to speak of the landscape without drawing the trees; how to evoke the soil without painting the mountains; how to say something personal without being confessional; how to demonstrate wholeness, interconnectedness, without preaching or being dogmatic. These are problems that I continue to face when making pictures.

In the skull paintings of late (Winter Messenger and Summer Receiver), I’ve been taking up a more representational style. A means of capturing the vividness of a waking dream. I find it unnerving that our skulls can be so close at hand, so evident under our skins and yet so otherworldly. The ethereality of skulls is belied by their (awful) commonness.

printmaking

All of the prints shown on this site were made at HuiPress, the amazing print studio directed by Paul Mullowney. While I lived on Maui, the Hui was like a second home. Though most of these prints were never editioned, they are labeled ‘open edition’, meaning that it is still possible to make more prints from these plates. However, since I do not have my own print studio the likelihood of doing so is pretty low. While I gravitate toward etching, I’ve often employed other printmaking methods in my work such as monoprint and silkscreen.