The making and viewing of art is transformative. It is a spiritual experience even more than an intellectual one.
I work in painting, drawing and sculpture. In painting, I begin my artwork as an experiment with a particular set of colors, or, for sculpture, elements. The goal is to see what sort of expression I can get from the various combinations and the handling of the colors and material itself. The basic result is that much of my work has been nonobjective although it contained suggested forms.
I consider the goal of abstraction to be the most difficult and the pinnacle of the use of art as an visual language. And although much of my art contains figurative elements, I will always consider myself primarily an abstract artist. (Even without seeing defined form, the natural human instinct is to imagine identifiable images.)
My motto: “Fire knows only the laws of fire,” is a quote from my best friend Katherine back in 1968, (spoken under very odd circumstances, but that is another story.) But the idea has had resonance with me all these years. Applied to painting: From the first searching mark placed on a canvas, the painting begins to define itself more and more narrowly until there is no more to discuss. Paint knows only the laws of paint and the image knows only itself as it struggles to emerge. Each is like a willful child growing into an independent image.
Any element behaves only as its particular state of being allows it to behave. And each piece of art demands its own format. The motto also applies to drawing. (Sculpture also knows the laws of physics.) Even though I work from a model, the drawings are all very different. Certain expressions require the color from paint or the limited palette of traditional drawing, while others require three dimensions, or motion/time or interaction. For this reason, my work is varied. Each new piece cries to be its own event.
