Artist Statement

 
Body and Cloth has been my subject for many years. Either cloth is in concert with the body or cloth takes on its own alchemical dance of transformation. With the bodies I mean to capture something of the significance and strength of character that has been gained by lasting through uncertainties and vulnerabilities within the forces of life and death. The bodies and cloth are meant to perform similar conditions metaphorically as they knot and loosen in emotional tying up and releasing. I see the folds as sensuous, turning in on themselves, taking unique, never to happen again forms, mimicking how each person’s composite traits and qualities are distinctly their own.

 I often paint the cloth with only the impression of the body. I mean those images to portray intimate records of physical presence, beings that were there and are no more. They are of left over representations that have very little identity attached to them, only impressions or indications in the cloth of someone remaining while gone. Several meanings can be applied. One is that the paintings and drawings are characterizations of the struggle to accept the departure of loved ones and the eventual nonexistence of the self. 

Most recently, I am concentrating on the aging body in its magnificent wrinkling, sagging, and translucently colorful array of changing forms. During the pandemic, hitting my heart were the conditions that led to the most defenseless among us, our elders, of which I am rapidly becoming one, succumbing in great numbers to the disease. As we move out of the nightmare of covid 19, it because of the tragically lonely deaths and fearful existence of the seniors that I concentrate on images of aging.

 

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