The awareness of beauty is a powerful experience...
it creates a pause from our usual mental noise. In that experience we glimpse the transcendent nature of life. Beauty wakes us to the mystery of Life. At the heart of my work is the desire to savor and express the essence of that experience.
ARTIST STATEMENT
As an artist, my life and my art are about opposites. I am a native North Carolinian, with deep roots in the Blue Ridge mountains which reach back to the 1700’s. I love Appalachian culture and art, and at an early age, I also fell in love with Asian art and culture. My art education and training was in classical fine arts, receiving a Fine Arts degree from UNC-Greensboro. Yet afterwards, I worked as a graphic designer and illustrator for over thirty years. After many years of feeling pulled by opposite worlds (fine art and commercial art), I began to integrate elements from both in my art, loving the juxtaposition of opposites. I integrate collage with traditional painting and drawing, and abstract elements alongside realistic ones. My images reflect my love of both Appalachian and Asian cultures, fine art and graphic design, and figurative and abstract art. This has led to a freedom to incorporate everything I love instead of feeling limited to one style or medium.
I often create hand painted or monoprinted papers which may be printed on Chinese newspaper, deli paper or Thesaurus pages as a starting point for my paintings. This has helped me develop a more intuitive approach to developing my images. In addition, I may add twigs, wire, rolled messages, as well as handwritten characters (Hebrew, Sanskrit, Chinese or made up asemic writing) to paintings as a way to add additional layers, textures and elements. My work is about the juxtaposition and integration of things that seem unrelated. Mixed media has opened a new language for me to express what is seen as well as not seen, what has value, what we long for and what is cast aside.
In the current culture of increasing polarity, I strive to create work which evokes a sense of wholeness and balance between seemingly disparate elements. Throughout my life as an artist, I have increasingly found that the deeper I look into all the fabrics and threads of life, the more I find that things which may appear to be dramatically opposed to each other on the surface are often firmly and artistically connected at their very essence.
In 2004, I moved back to the mountains of NC and refocused my attention on painting and exhibiting. In 2018, I became an artist in residence at Yadkin Cultural Arts Center and maintain a full-time working studio there.