When I paint and create installations, I leave openings for the unexpected. I start in a direction I can't predict an ending for, and try to stay accident-prone, hoping for highs like stumbling on an arrowhead lying in the middle of a trail. When that's going well, the work can stop me in my tracks and pull me into absolute awareness.
My finished work is often humorous, sometimes dark, with an inner-world of mythic narratives filled woth autobiographical and archetypal content.
Currently, the painting series revealed, finds wild animals on commercial camouflage cloth. Each animal reveals itself during the process, some immediately, some more slowly, and my putting a brush down on printed canvas makes for an unusually active relationship between the medium, myself and the emerging content. Camouflage patterns, designed to hide, are repurposed to reveal. Works in progress include a forest of crows, spawning salmon, and a lone wolf.
Some of my Installations, such as Impermanent Marks, are interactive and immersive, while others, such as Aunt Helen, are their own scaled-down three-dimensional worlds.
My photography and photographic curating cares about how we humans interact, what we mean to one another, and how we see ourselves. I'm always on the lookout for visual clues, like bitten fingernails on a new father's hand, a baby laughing too hard to keep his eyes open, or a tired mother's gesture that says, "Get over here NOW!"
And sometimes poems come out of paintings or photos, and sometimes, harder, a painting comes out of a poem.