Artist Statement

I am a contemporary, experimental, mixed-media painter. I create artwork in a search for peace, clarity and order from my own experience of the world as a place of disorder, chaos and uncertainty.

My process is to combine representation, figuration and symbolism with varying degrees of abstraction to evoke ambiguous narratives. When making art, I move from chaos to order. My paintings generally start with random abstract colour fields. I distort and add visual noise as I work in the representational components creating a symbolic chaos. I then locate and intensify those elements within the chaos which best focus my narrative or symbolic intention. I use mixed media both to create distinct layers and to create a synthesis between media that merges the qualities of each.

I make mixed media paintings that are relevant to a wider public by creating emotionally resonant but technically innovative artwork. Over the years, my contemporary approach, and experimentation with new technologies, has led me to experiment with the use of image scanning, digital photo processing, and printing technologies in combination with traditional painting materials, especially pastel and various water media. This naturally followed from my exploration and experimentation with various combinations of photography and painting, including using photo images as models for drawing and collaging photo transfers into mixed-media painted surfaces.

For the last several years, I've been using digital image processing tools to alter photos with changes to scale, proportion, cropping, the introduction of visual noise, altered perspective, and warping. I want to distort the image to represent the world as I experience it. I then create a grisaille under layer with digital printing onto a support which may also have layers of underpainting. Once printed, I add layers of pastel and/or acrylic to provide painterly qualities. This technique enables me to create artwork that hints of photographic content but is also clearly a painting, a distinctly different artwork that merges qualities of both sources.

I have been most influenced in my creative journey by literary sources including Yasuneri Kawabata, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Paul Auster, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Umberto Eco. I have also found that studying about Vermeer, El Greco, Cézanne, Picasso, Whistler, Morandi, Rauschenberg, Degas, Warhol, Asian prints and ink paintings, and elements of the photo realism movement has been quite influential for my artistic development.

I was raised in a working class environment marked by more than the usual artists’ familial dysfunction, trauma and loss. My education and inclinations have made me an outsider within my family; my origins and lack of academic credentials keep me on the fringes of Alaska's contemporary arts world. Even my chosen medium of painting is marginalised by current curatorial practices. My position in the world as a whole is that of a misfit somewhat accepted by any number of groups, but always on the outer margins looking in.

I have been painting and passionate about art since 1974. Born and raised in Alaska, I now live in Anchorage. Essentially self-trained over a lifetime, making, exhibiting and selling art has been my primary occupation since the end of 1996.