Drawings

I am a painter and sculptor and draw along side of my work. The graphite drawings on thousands of vellum-like balls are a series of repetitive movements that track my nervous system. I am interested in the combination of mapping my system and seeing how my images change throughout the day according to my insides. My energy changes from moment to moment and the jagged and jittery lines are a reaction to those changes. The balls are contained in stationary and moveable boxes.

Sculpture

My Sesbania Sculptures are contradictions of unstoppable tension and stillness - simple pieces with major complexities. The luscious cream-colored freestanding sculptures have an energetic motion and rhythm born from cutting Sesbania, a natural wood product, used as corks, imported from the wetlands outside Hanoi. The work, like me, wants to be understood and unadorned. But only by those willing to commit to resting and seeing what comes to them. The hidden part of the work is about life and love, death and illness - the negotiations between won, and sometimes lost, lifetime battles. Simplicity comes to the forefront in its form and color. It is familiar and touching, belabored and heartfelt with markings of ancient universal memories.

The work begins with the cutting of the corks. All four sides are shaved with a paring knife, creating an irregular square. It is this irregularity that attracts me. Each cork has its own size and shape - a parallel of individuality. Nothing is wasted. From the largest piece to the tiniest scrap, they all find their own way into the construction. I use the variations of texture and size inherent to Sesbania to bring tension and movement into the sculpture. Repetition is used to calm and quiet that tension. The countless hours, patience and persistence needed to assemble each sculpture is an intrinsic part of the piece's lesson and meaning.

My body of work has been an evolution of ideas using containers as a source of inspiration. As a child growing up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania near the Amish, I became mesmerized by the objects of their lives: the large metal basins used to feed cattle, the canvas feedbags hung over the horses' heads, and the homes that peppered the landscape. This imprint has stayed with me throughout my career. My early work explored primitive shelters and nomadic dwellings experienced in India and Central America. These dwellings evolved into images of boats inspired by the shores of Provincetown. From there, cradles and caskets replaced the images of boats. In 1996, during a trip to Viet Nam, I first encountered the corks and fell in love with the material’s soft, smooth texture and its ability to be sliced and manipulated into delicate and fragile curves. From there, I began incorporating the material into the three bases of my work: sculpture, painting, and drawing.

Paintings

Containers have been a constant source of inspiration for my work during the past ten years. In previous years, I painted primitive shelters and nomadic dwellings that I experienced in India and Central America. They were replaced by cradles and caskets developed from the boats on the beaches of Provincetown. During my travels to VietNam in 1996, I was attracted to the heavy buckets strapped across the shoulders of men and women and children, filled with fruits and vegetables for market. Buckets began to appear everywhere in my art. As this work continues, the markings of the buckets become more abstract, and the canvases are larger in scale and more vibrant in color.

Painted Polaroids

Throughout my twenty-five year art career, I have worked with 35mm film alongside my abstract painting and sculpture. Within the past ten years, I have been working on abstract methods to create photographic images that appear painterly and at the same time hold up as photographs. Using SX 70 and 600 Plus Polaroid film, I manipulate the images I photograph as the film is developing, thus creating abstract effects with line. I push the image further by oil painting onto the Polaroid surface. The combination of the line drawn with a pointed instrument which changes the surface of the photograph and loosely oil painting over selected areas of the picture allows for an original multi-image.

When I first started this process, I was doing self-portraits. Friends started asking me to do portraits of them and I began the business of 'Art in Your Face'. Later I started to paint historical towns, landscapes and commonplace objects which became cards and a means to support my painting and sculpture. My first book of painted Polaroids, called Dog in the Dunes, published in 1998 by Andrews McMeel, is a series of forty painted Polaroids of my black Labrador during an artist residency in a dune shack on Cape Cod. Provincetown East West, published by University Press of New England in May of 2002, is my second book depicting the seaside fishing village and artist colony of Provincetown. I have been working on a book of New York City in the same spirit.

Fields Publishing has republished Dog in the Dunes, as Dog in the Dunes Revisited in the spring of 2005. Fields Publishing is based in Provincetown, MA, the hometown of Dog in the Dunes. This new printing is an expanded addition of painted Polaroids and larger in size from the original.
My work has moved into collaged photographs. The photographs are taken, cut, pasted and laid out to created a larger photograph and then painted with oil paint. I am currently working on a new book of paintings of dogs in humorous settings such as parties and holiday gatherings. The book has a deeper inside meaning paralleling the Buddhist philosophy of patiently waiting for the events in our lives to happen.....as we know dogs do so naturally.