My painting springs from the desire to capture and hold the sense, both specific and intangible, of the natural external and the subjective inner world.
I am interested in combining particular and autobiographical experience with more universal content in the form of mythological or art-historical references. Juxtapositions of imagery are found through integration of observation, symbolisms and poetic metaphor. As in a dream, these relationships can be both compelling and sensual or disturbing and disorienting; I attempt in my work to achieve the same visual and emotional pull.
I derive inspiration in large part from nature – the changing varieties of light and season that signify the passing of time. The paintings likewise are built up over long periods of time – the layered sediment of various art media and natural objects, reflecting the process of growth, decay, death and rebirth in the natural world and in an individual's passage through life.
In art, three realities can lose their boundaries and become one: that which exists briefly here now, that which exists only in memory and that which never exists but in the mind and heart. T.S. Eliot opens his poem "Burnt Norton" from The Four Quartets with the lines:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in the time future
And time future contained in the time past.
...Footfalls in the memory
Down the passage we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.