Artist’s Statement
My love for narrative propels my paintings, drawing and sculpture. I use my signature stylistic view to create snapshot moments that tell a story. My work makes people smile and often laugh out loud. I get great satisfaction and feel the work is successful when I can capture emotion and humor. Through the use of stylized figures, fashion, furniture and objects, I look for a moment, a gesture, a place, and use my creative insight to interpret and recreate it. The interpretive images employed provide the viewer with easy access into the narrative of the painting. I often crop the subject to remove any identity so that the viewer can imagine being a participant within the painting. It is my goal to expand my work into several collections that include sculpture and installations in unison with painting. Recently my work has expanded into book illustrations, including children’s literature.
I incorporate a base idea with interchanging subjects and allow the story to evolve. One example is my “Cocktail Party Series”. In this series, I intentionally left the heads off the figures – cropping the view to get the viewer in further as a voyeur and participant. There is a familiarity to the situation – a cluster of women laughing and holding glasses of champagne or wine, for instance, as if a funny story has triggered “a moment”. The work is not literal, but the message is, and the body language along with the balance of the gestures and composition are all important to telling the full story and creating the exchange within the painting. I am constantly looking at the shapes, positive and negative, and the in-and-out movement of the composition, along with the color, in order to expand the painting out to the viewer. I have a keen eye for fashion and trends and incorporate these elements in my paintings to keep it current, accessible and new. This body of work has become a signature style for me.
Currently, I am expanding the cocktail series into the room environments and incorporating patterns and stripes. I love patterns, including color and stripes, for the strength they give the painting. For me the furniture pieces I draw and paint take on a figurative element and become another person in the room as they show emotion and movement supporting the main figure. I have journeyed through many ways of telling my artistic stories and currently feel I have found the rhythm and clarity for my vision and style.
