“The artist’s job is to be a witness to [her] time in history.”

                                                                                                    Robert Rauschenberg

I am an abstract painter that works with the figure.

My intention is visual seduction; it is not story telling.

In questioning my visual voice and where it needs to go, I found dealing solely, non-objectively, with colored composition to be empty, lonely. Including figures made the commitment to that color choice much more honest. There was no longer any excuse for ambiguity - it had to be right because it has to make sense in relation to  a world that we can aesthetically experience.

Once the decision is made to include the the figure and establish a narrative, it  opens up all kinds of possibilities. I have painted about identity and dehumanization, the high school shootings, the wars, 9-11, the environment, more wars and bombers.

Painting is no longer the “I” activity that explores an internal aesthetic.

Painting becomes the action that responds to and communicates.

21st Century Myths

FORSAKEN       66” x 97”

the Good Book

          66” x 47”

STILL LIFE        55” x 63”

    GRASS DON’T GROW        78” x 88”

WITNESS

50” x 94”

                                                                  The news that evening spoke of sixty thousand refugees,

families amassed on a hill with all their possessions in boxes and bundles.

They were being teased with promises of a new  home.                                                                                                                                                                       The next evening reported that on that hilltop, now there were only lifeless, fragmented bundles.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

silence

A few days later two kids shot twelve of their

classmates, jocks, and the coach, then themselves. They were also being teased

for being different.

Another mountain bloodied.

tears

Some innate characteristic of humanity includes selfishness, violence and destruction.

What has been the outcome of these brutal, inimical impulses?

anger, frustration, hopelessness, fear, violence

In our insulated, orderly environments can we connect, can we feel the pain of random waste.

Or is it only the vicarious pain, brought to you nightly by the talking heads.

Shielded by the glass of the TV screen, how easy it is to deny that it can affect us.

the child and the silence

(based on the Massacre of the Innocence)

54” x 90”

no one screamed

24’ x 42”