Paintings
Over a period of years before I turned 30, I lost a number of immediate family members, two of the most significant having been ill and under my care. I had always felt a kind of bond to the expressive and immediate qualities in music, and decided to use the music that aided me so much through those years as a starting point in expressing my grief through art. These images are a result of those expressions. Most of the shapes, even if highly abstracted to the point of non-objectivity, represent a specific object, place or individual from that time in my life.
Drawings
The images I create celebrate the beauty and delicately alluring lines of the human form. Like the environments of the people they represent, the backgrounds in my drawings help shape the souls that will emerge. I begin each piece with spontaneous and broad sweeps of conté crayon or charcoal, each background unique to the figure I will be creating on top of it. And then, cutting into the environment I’ve created, I develop a figure using both additive and subtractive techniques, disturbing the initial strokes as little as possible. The female figure symbolizes a woman emerging from her background, her past, or situation, to form her own person, creating her own world in line and shadow, but never fully abandoning the environment from which she was created.