ARTIST STATEMENT
I never really made a choice about becoming an artist, as the creative impulse and desire to make things was there from the beginning. From a young age I was hard wired to draw and to paint, and my skills were recognized early on. I never looked for approbation from the academy, though, as I found the classroom stifling. Instead, my reference points were my lived experience and engagement with the world at large. Forever curious, I am attuned to people who have the imagination to create environments, integrating an aesthetic awareness with the business of life- often times women. Too, my sense of wanderlust and adventure has always informed my artistic practice, whether it meant traveling the remote corners of Indonesia and Malaysia on a mission to find rare textiles made by Indigenous tribes, or falling in love with Australian plants, studying Florentine and Sienese paintings and frescos of the 15th century, or going crazy over early modern furniture and design. I am a man with great enthusiasms.
As an art maker I have somewhat anachronistic proclivities for long unbroken stretches of stillness, and long looking. With a history of working at home, integrating a love for food preparation, and gardening, mine has been an organic tactile journey of the senses. The arch of my paintings has been divergent. Whether building abstractions with a figurative means, making highly refined and ephemeral finger applied abstract conversations about the relationship between inner and outer phenomena, or revisiting a figurative pastel drawing I made at 7, and re-exploring that state of innocence and wonder some 60 years later. Trusting my tendencies, that feel indelible like fingerprints, to create throughlines of coherency. Always relying on passion and wonder, to circumnavigate what seems like a great journey through the unknowable.
My so-called oeuvre exists as part of a continuum and the finger paintings I made at six still have resonance for me today many, many decades later. Each drawing and painting may be thought of as a world unto itself, but the whole catalogue of my creative output is just a constellation of points in time, veritable snapshots. Sometimes I am quite deliberate in my approach as I'm enthralled by something | have seen: a painting, a plant, sunset or cloud; and at other times it's a dance and the form unspools from some inner reservoir of consciousness. I am replenished by the act of looking and by long unbroken stretches of stillness. My life is integral to my art and I am at home in environments where I can wander the garden, make food and engage sensually with organic forms. Whether building abstractions in a nonobjective sense or using figurative means, there is for me always a relationship between outward appearance and the suggestion of something more, something hovering, humming, reverberating. It is this convergence I am after. Always relying upon passion and wonder, I am an adventurer, an explorer circumnavigating the corners of the world and my environment traveling up river.