Artist Statement
My paintings are subjective constructions created mostly to accommodate and fulfill certain psychological needs. They are created to express, articulate, and bring to life deep feelings, ideas or impulses that are fundamental to my existence. They create a playing field where the relationships of the most incongruous elements can produce moods and situations that can, in themselves, be a redemptive phenomena.
There are three factors that comprise the essence of my works: oil paint as a material, non-descriptive means of expression, and the non-representational use of the human figure.
The exploitation and utilization of the physical qualities of oil paint as an independent factor- its unique ability to produce a thick, three-dimensional body that generates a strong sensation of the material, and creates spontaneous, high-speed passages from one tone and value to another.
The employment of means of expression in a way that reveals more of their inner nature and inherent relationships than being simply descriptive instruments of the shapes and forms that they fashion.
The human figures that participate in the compositions are geometric and schematic to better inhabit the general abstract form of the work. They relate to each other by the formal means of color, line, shape, and composition. They have been displaced from their previous space, and been distorted, deformed, pushed, stretched and pressed against a thick painted background.
The paint and the figure, and their interchanging relationships, create a pictorial, shallow, and haptic space that is governed only by the immanent laws of painting. Other factors that contribute in the formation of this space are the superimposition of the brushstrokes over brushstrokes, and shapes over shapes, the employment of the expanding/contracting quality of color, the movement of forces in and out of the picture plane, and the geometrical nature of the composition.