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ARTIST'S STATEMENT
At time I feel like I
am living in one of my landscape paintings and
drawings. That line that exists between reality and
the way I depict it in my work seems to blur sometimes
-- especially when the light is extraordinary or space
and color contrasts are amplified. My surroundings and
my travels have impacted my visual experience and my
work greatly. I grew up in Southern California and was
literally soaking in that bright light for years. The
familiarity with light and color left a permanent
imprint on me and has been the primary source of my
artistic inspiration. The underlying theme that runs
through all of my work is the idea of an transcendent
reality. I have always been intrigued by my own dream
imagery -- not necessarily the contextual
psychological plots but the actual visual imagery ---
that heightened sense of reality that is experienced
in the rare lucid dream or in moments of pure
transcendence. I play with the notion that our visual
reality is perhaps a mirror image of a parallel
reality that exists on a slightly higher vibration. It
is that which I try to achieve in my works of
"realism" -- a heightened sense of place, of mood, of
feeling.
I was serious about my
desire to paint as early as grade school. I studied
painting and drawing at Otis Art Institute and The Art
Center College of Design in Los Angeles and
subsequently earned a Bachelor's of Fine Arts Degree
in Painting and Drawing from the California State
University in Long Beach. I now live and work in
Northern California. My recent interest has been in
exploring the natural and altered terrain of the
farmland, wine country, rivers, marshlands and coastal
regions of the Western States in addition to my
travels across the country and in Europe.
Soft pastel has been my
preferred medium since I first started exploring with
it in college. Nothing compares to those pigments to
achieve the rich color that suits me and the
spontaneity they provide. I work with several
varieties and brands from the butter-like Unison to
Rembrandt as well as homemade sticks. My surfaces are
the finest archival papers like LeCarte and Wallis or
prepared boards. Layers of color are applied and some
blending is achieved using fingers and blending
sticks. Rather than adopting a "technique" I utilize
my formal training as a painter to build a pastel much
the same way that I paint an oil on canvas. For me the
transforming activity of manipulating the pigments on
the surface of the paper or board is a uniquely
important part of the overall process of creating
these images.
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