All paintings are oil on canvas, wood panel, or aluminium panel, except where noted. Materials I use often but not always: oil stick, oil pastel, charcoal, oil based spray paint, and paper collage.  My styles of painting have changed according to what I felt I needed to do in order to push my work further into explorations of new kinds of space. This new knowledge emerges over the course of painting. I work wet in wet, and usually finish the work in one or two intense sessions, with anywhere from 30 to 50 brushes to clean at the end. The title I choose is something that reveals itself from the painting when it is finished. I like to work to music. Often it is the track of a song, or lyrics that entered into my consciousness as I worked and informed the narrative of the composition. I sometimes take a break when I hit a wall and work in a different medium, such as performance, video, drawing, photography and sculpture. The best is to have a hand in several disciplines at the same time, because they all inform each other. A period of intense performance work in 1999 - 2001 made me understand that the process of painting has a physical element that requires the engagement of the body in service to the medium of painting. I saw a good example of this in the large early cubist examples of Picasso’s works from The Shchukin Collection at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Movement of the body necessarily is the major driver of dialogue between thought and material in painting. I would go so far to say this performance creates the meaning and content of a painting. Hence, the authorship of a painting is intrinsic to the body that physically created it.  Painting is a performance and if I stop altogether for a while, I experience an acute form of stage fright before I begin again.

 

I would say the non-verbal language of dance and music composition is the overriding process and method of my work in every medium throughout my life. 

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April  2020