Visual Poetry - Abstract

This group of paintings is inspired by our planet earth--aerial views and views of the air. Traditionally, landscape painters record the view across the surface of the earth with the inevitable horizon line dividing the canvas into two basic areas. It is like painting a figurative portrait in profile: the canvas is divided into two fundamental compositional areas, one side of the face and whatever lies behind it.

I am experimenting with an unconventional view. I am painting her full face rather than her profile. Looking down at the earth or up at the sky there is no visible horizon: the earth’s features alone serve as the fundamental compositional elements. There is no horizon, no predetermined division of my working surface. The result is more abstract, less predictable.

This series, Faces of Planet Earth, focuses on the workings of the elements wind, water and fire on the face and the atmosphere of our earth, as well as the marks left by technology such as agriculture and mining. The Dunes series remark on sunlight and shadow moving over windswept sands. The Water Wheels series comment on agriculture’s circular irrigation in the Great Plains of the United States. From the air you can see well-defined active circles and disappearing, abandoned, partial, and less round circles overlapping each other, forming fascinating accidental patterns.

Like the moon and the other planets in our solar system, the earth is a reflective body, absorbing and reflecting the sun’s light to varying degrees—darker areas, like forests, being more absorbent and brighter areas, like glaciers, being more reflective. I have used a metallic background and applied many thin layers of paint as a structural reminder of our earth’s luminescence.

I find the source and inspiration for my art in the things I see in the real world, the things I see in my imagination, and the things I dream. I feel and remember them in my body. Making art is most exciting when I work from three dimensional real life; a model, a still life, a landscape, an interior. Visual reality doesn’t bind me. I find the poetic image in my heart, sometimes poignant or impossible, curious or exciting, humorous or tragic. Frequently, I choose to distort or alter the image I am viewing to emphasize spatial relationships, to increase aesthetic interest or to dramatize emotions. I also work from photographs, images I find in on the internet, or in books, magazines and newspapers, sometimes images that I have photographed. Usually I combine images from various sources to create a composition on canvas. I also work from memory, a more difficult process because my memories are impressions rather than complete pictures. I usually fail to notice the details. So when I paint my imagination fills the canvas. My mind’s eye is the cauldron where I cook the composition of forms and lines, and spice it with light, shadow and color. Psychologically, my most profound paintings usually originate and develop from responding to paint I’ve smeared randomly on the canvas. The brush strokes suggest images that reveal themselves to me in fuller and fuller detail as I paint.

I show a painting like a chef serves up a meal, with the hope that my work will satisfy the guests’ appetites and delight their senses.