High Density

As a painter I think in layers and read meaning into my applied layers. Making decisions in my painting process, I move from exterior answers to formal questions to an interior and fabricated resolution. Painting gives me the opportunity to juxtapose objects in order to unsettle assumptions and realities. Layers of paint and layers of images are spread on a flat surface in order to baffle and delight. In my series, High Density, I am working on creating a sense of the density of dwellings and compact living that relates to urban realities and cluster development. As paint is layered with and without rendered lines, I am challenged to find generations of dwellings one upon the other and inside and outside each other with a whimsy that takes one’s mind off chaos and despair.

Tankers

In the Channel Series paintings, my focus is on massive moving objects - the oil tankers that enter and leave the ship channel of Portland, Maine. While I concentrate, moments of absorption in these gentle giants are fleeting. Like time the tankers approach slowly, float by, and are suddenly out of view. I experience an urgency to catch every glimpse of each tanker as it passes. To grab something before it is missed. The tempo is quick while the process is deliberate. Studying the colors, shapes, sizes, and lines of tankers, I imagine ways to fabricate these tankers into small, flat paintings. My challenge is to reinvent the familiar making it translatable for the viewer, maybe even buoyant.

Dweople

(dwee’ pel) Dwelling People. People and memories live in dwellings. People dwell in our memory. Their presence and absence fill our abodes. Interior memories coexist with exterior realities as the inside and outside merge in the Dweople paintings. With color and whimsy, dwellings and people converge as Dweople. The presence of a new reality appears with the invention of dwellings that defy convention and exist on legs with little feet suggesting the delicate balance between memory and reality. A playful optimism teases the viewer as the forms, referring to dwellings and people, are juxtaposed. Some hold hands, and some hold memories. Dweople inhabit my paintings.

Pods

Pods represent my on-going dialogue between the inside and the outside. Pods are transitional paintings that are bringing me to an exterior place. The organic forms referring to interior space of the body become exterior forms and couples as stems become legs.