I walked away from painting in 1997, vowing to never paint again. Twenty years later, I started
painting again.​
Initially fueled by the organic shapes and vivid colors of Henri Matisse’s cut-outs and Yayoi
Kusama’s paintings, I set out to find a new visual language of my own.
​Often working from an initial Photoshop sketch, I search the internet and books for images of
exotic flora and fauna, both macroscopic and microscopic (leaves, coral, diatoms, viruses, etc.).
I skew, warp and distort them in Photoshop until I see something I like. I then draw the
resulting shapes with chalk on canvas with an acrylic background and work with them there in
chalk until I’m ready to apply paint.
​I use saturated color, flat shapes, rectilinear backgrounds and borders; embellished with dots,
marks, stripes and flowers to build my composition. I often photograph the work in progress on
my iPhone and load it back into Photoshop to work out problems and new ideas.
In my recent paintings, I have strived to express movement as well.
These paintings are all acrylic on unstretched canvas. They hang loosely by pushpins or
grommets and suggest banners, flags, quilts or tapestries.
​In the end, I want my work to be joyous, a retinal delight, and buzzing with life.