Take My Hand

Description

Artist Statement

After painting traditional botanical watercolors for 25 years, nature continues to be my muse. Experiences, sensations and blurry memories inspire me to give visual voice to the beauty, fragility and ephemeral nature of our world.
I paint in oil, watercolor, and draw with metal pointe. Currently my oil paintings are unplanned, with each brushstroke and addition of color leading to what comes next.

Glazing transparent layers of pure pigments over and over again allows your eye to see through the layers, the light to bounce back and create infinite changes of glowing color. I call this “optical mixing” because your eye does the mixing. I do not mix my colors on a pallet.
I am able to be spontaneous and immediate as I move, make marks, and dance my way over the surface of a canvas. These works are open-ended improvisations.

Each series of paintings is a narrative guided by passion. I explore how to express my energy and emotion until I find my voice. Through the studio process I allow the unconscious to become visual. My work is a balance between pure abstraction and identifiable subject matter. The ambiguity of meaning allows the paintings to have multiple layers of interpretation.

When drawing with metalpointe, I use silver and gold, on specially prepared paper. This is also a layering process because too much pressure with the stylus on the paper, will leave an indentation or hole. Over time the metals oxidize and a change of color occurs. These become “living drawings” as they will continue to tarnish and alter over a lifetime.

I live in Katonah, NY, and teach drawing and painting in my studio, StoneHouse Studio.