Artist Statement

Why do I paint botanical forms?  They enable me to find a variety of more interesting forms, ideas, and structures than I could dream up by myself.  But I look for ideas in nature that conform to the painting ideas I have from years of painting and teaching.  Still, I don’t place too much value on subject matter.  My lack of involvement with it enables me to concentrate on the painting.  And my painting ideas come as much from art, travel and studying diverse cultures as from nature.  I often look at the images of Matisse, Bosch, Hans Hofmann, Southern Song dynasty art and the gorgeous embellishments on the wood and stones in Korean Buddhist temple architecture.

My paintings are abstract in the sense that they depart from representational accuracy.  I often select and then exaggerate or simplify botanical forms that are suggested in the world around me in my garden in Arizona.

The most recent combined encaustic and oil paintings continue my exploration of those emblems of the microcosm that I invent or discover.  I still try to investigate various systems of order versus what at first appears to be nature’s chaos. My working process on these current paintings involves continual changes in texture, form, and color that develop during each studio work session until the piece is realized, insisting on its own eccentric presence in the world.

Every painting I begin makes its own demands.  The wonder of this dialogue with paint, color form and space is what keeps me excited about working.  My memories hold all that I have seen, heard and touched in this world.  More time for travel and working in my own garden here in Tucson keep new ideas arriving constantly!  All the colors, shapes and forms I have experienced are stored and ready to be drawn upon when I am working.  When I paint, I am an explorer in the terrain of my own psyche discovering what will emerge as the work develops.

I am grateful to the American painter, Philip Pearlstein, for the thoughts behind my statement.  Pearlstein’s knowledge of himself as a painter at the end of the Fifties nailed down the essence of how I feel now.   When Pearlstein expressed these thoughts I was still a very young art student at Ohio State University.