Floating On Indigo
Floating On Indigo
Acrylic on Canvas Board, 12” x 16”
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Acrylic on Canvas Board, 12” x 16”
Lincolnshire, Illinois, USA
Artist Statement
I seek to make visual love poems, narratives of pivotal moments where what happens before, after and even during is open with possibility. The frame encloses an otherwise ordinary environment and an otherwise uneventful moment to suggest the inevitability of a next move. Constraining the space and loading it with extremes, or simplifying to a minimum, sets up the apex of the story. The figures’ interactions—him and her, him and the past, her and the future—overlay the present moment making any next move is possible. Their proximity, gestures and expressions call for the next move, a moment of choice. The viewer engages in the tension enhanced by borders, boundaries and thresholds, escalation of color, and inclusion or exclusion of details. The artist doesn’t know what each figure presented in these paintings will do next and invites the viewer to imagine.
I have always been moved by story. We tell them out loud to each other and silently, to ourselves, sometimes without realizing it. Narrative connects the subtle, revealing and creating meaning. The branch, the chair, the adored, the longing, the projection, the connection. Words move us. And images do as well, hopefully not just the instant and disposable.
The paintings develop after selecting materials, finding color based on sensitivity to hue, saturation, and tone, and the body responds to an emotional connection to the act of applying the paint and moving. Seeing the image is witnessing and in turn experiencing the artist’s interaction with materials imbued with an emotional response to the subject matter and the physical. It is the visual trail of a kind of dance.
For me, my work is both a release and a reaching. I seek to uphold the human experience as ripe with possibility, exaltation, and relentless exuberance. Instead of consenting to the constraint of the forceful logic of the world we find ourselves currently living in. We may move through our days and nights more or less unaware of creatures, impulses, desires, even regrets, until something stirs.
We are awakened by the surprise interruption. The moment is charged with choosing the next move, offering possible connection and expansion. I seek to behold the wild and welcome the untamed.
Bio
Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1957, I hold a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Fine Art at the University of Illinois in Champaign and a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I am an award-winning artist and have received grants for both visual work as well as a collaborative opera, “The Martha.” My work has been exhibited in Europe and the US and is included in private collections in the US and Canada. I also have prints available on Minted.com.
In 2017, Rare Nest Gallery in Chicago invited me to be a founding artist, which was an absolute game-changer. I have since been enjoying a consistent and immersive career path.
The artist, like the musician, the novelist, the actor, the composer, the poet, the director… and other… creates portals to a perspective that can be so much more imaginative and engaging than the daily world we are called to function in. I am enormously delighted and satisfied with living life through creating images.