Recent paintings

Minds I series

My earliest memories involve sitting in silence on roughly hewn, darkly stained, handcrafted benches. I would listen to the sound of trains in the distance and run my fingers over the hexagonal shape of brass tacks that held the coarse faded upholstery in place. Sunday morning meditation in a 19th century Quaker Meetinghouse, a place for people to gather, with family and friends, to sit in silent worship. The practice of sensing “the light” or being “moved to speak” shaped my experience of the world around me. My “Minds I” paintings reflect my relationship to meditation. My goal is to make a visual representation of the inner mingling of thoughts, emotions and physical sensations – a kind of idiosyncratic map of the mind. Painting is a way to conjure an experience beyond words, a world that I plumb for a deeper connection to myself and to others. Finding symbols and metaphors for human existence are essential to the process of visually articulating subtle and nuanced internal experiences. In that sense my paintings are like dreams; personal hieroglyphics that form visual sentences, symbols in conversation. I gravitate towards simple, natural and geometric images: eyes, vertebrae, wings, hexagons, prayer beads, clouds, femur bones, and grids which offer multiple interpretations. I curate image sequences onto rigorously painted surfaces, representing the mind’s charged atmosphere where existing realties transform into new sequences and syntax. I use Emily Dickinson prose as titles because she also communicated her internal world through symbols that I imagine were derived from her relationship to the silence she experienced in seclusion and she wrote with an economy of words that remind me of Quaker aspirations towards simplicity. Each work is 22 x 30 inches and acrylic, watercolor and graphite on paper or canvas.