Thoughts

If I thought my work was only decorative, I'd give it up. It's a revolution - it just happens to hang on a wall. I paint to understand and alert others to the choices, options, and possibilities of making something special out of not very much. How different would this world be if we approached it with open eyes and an open heart. Art is Attention is Love.

I work with a kind of conceptual compost pile in which I keep lists of ambiguous ideas, words with a certain poetic feel and concepts that suggest shapes.

Mixed with these lists are piles of postage stamp size images clipped from magazines, packaging or found as litter. They're small because cropping makes an image appear larger, more abstract, and more isolated. There is a point where a cropped image becomes a symbol and looks like a word. It is from this shifting pile of image-words and word-images that my art takes its shape and content.

Most of my work is acrylic on unstretched canvas. I have worked this way since the 70's because:

1. I can make a painting any shape I want. I'm not limited to rectangles.
2. I can edit as I work - cutting out areas and stitching in new ones.
3. The finished piece exists as an object on a wall, not as a "window" into it.
4. Storage, shipping and durability. I use a 1/2 gesso and 1/2 matte medium primer which makes the paintings very flexible. I store and ship them rolled up.