THE POEM

            My intention is to reveal my psychic field through paint, representing abstract feelings and the different intensities in which they form.  In this format, I search for rational structure held by signs and symbols but often lose lucidity through the process of layering.

            The paintings always start with some type of symbolic image or text that I can’t help but strongly attach to.  Literature has always been something completely immersive to me; the psychological space it allows me to live in draws me towards the psychic space of the surrealists but without true love for their application of paint.  The act of building a painting is this transfer of inner body to outside sacred object—and to me this physical process must be visceral. Yet it is also a fight against my very human need to make form, and some sort of consolidation of these two opposing impulses.  I normally start a painting by projecting a line drawing, and cast my intentions from the warm projector like translating a grainy language. This dark-lit moment is where I decide which sentences can be truncated and which words must remain in order to retain the spirit of whatever emotion I’m after.  When choosing imagery I layer in objects that I personally attach to during sometimes arbitrary moments, creating personal symbols out of circumstance and impulse.  I draw words from people whom I admire for their feats in this very task of translating in to out—Walt Whitman, the epitome of free-form soul, and Okla Elliott, my master translator and grammar extraordinaire.  Sometimes I use direct quotes, but most of what is written is my own writing puttied by their influence—these authors translated into me and then me back out. Every aspect of this process is imperfect and ever changing; it relates to memory and how people store personal information and symbols.  Each of my paintings is like a snapshot of a memory, with the variety of layers, opacity of paint, and visual symbols intertwining with acts of painterly sensations. 

            I have a need to abandon something that would be a complete picture, or something that would have a uniform paint application, in order to remain true to my physic space.  This work is a build-up of transparent marks and imageries, often punctuated with very thick, quick moments of physical weight through wax and dirt. More intentional thoughts (lines of paint) then trace whimsical marks already dried and absorbed by the painting. Each of these marks is like a very small feeling, and then sometimes very large.