Recent Work
I will take you with me. We are leaving, moving to a new city and state. We will leave this home where we were married, where our son was born, where we learned to become parents. These paintings are memories, reflecting on the early years of marriage and motherhood. They are conversations about some of the tender, wondrous, and difficult moments and transitions, large and small, in this journey. They have a desire to talk about moments that really change us. They touch upon the personal, not for the sake of self-indulgence, but in the belief that we are better as individuals and a community if we share, both good and bad experiences, in order to connect with and support one another.
My work is rooted in the traditions of perceptual paintings, but is not married to painting exclusively from observation. One of the consequences of painting memories is that these moments are already gone. I am left to recreate this time through a reenactment of events, setting up the specific spot with the same or similar items as remembered, or as close as possible. The missing parts are created with the help of memory, photographs, and invention.
In selecting the point of view, I am generally not interested in illustrating an act, but rather present my perspective in a particular moment. For example, I do not paint the act of getting married, but rather my perspective of what I was looking at during breakfast on my wedding day. It was a moment of contemplation. My intention is to capture the feeling of that specific time. My hope is that within the work, a viewer can have his or her own experience, perhaps reminded of a similar time in his or her own life or simply by engaging with the art.