Artist’s Statement

All of these images stem from my interest in the natural world and its cycles, and my place in it.

My recent drawings, baskets and sculptural work are centered around my curiosity with the interplay of body and spirit during the transition from life to death -- a look into this subtle, natural cycle. I think of the drawings and the sculptures as questions: what does the transition from life to death look like? How is it both heavy and light? What is beautiful about this transition? These images and objects are tender, poetic, and somewhat playful. The questions they pose are meant to inform life and an appreciation for all of its cycles, both in nature and in culture. 

In my figurative paintings, I was interested in the relationship between the human body and the spirit body. For me, the immediacy of the painted image (the heaviness of the paint/brush work and the lightness of the color), fuses body and spirit into one image. Life and afterlife are one.

In my early ‘caveman’ series, I created clay figures and photographed them with a Polaroid SX-70 camera which allowed me to blur the focus. The images are dreamlike and idealistic. Rather than the traditional view of the 'caveman' as a failure (a less intelligent and more animal-like version of our modern selves), they imagine the subject as a perfect being, completely fused with his environment. One with nature.

 

Biography

I grew up in a small farming community in southwestern Louisiana, surrounded by hundreds of acres of woods and fields. Like many people raised in the 1960’s and 70’s, I spent most of my time outdoors.

I have always been a maker. Being an artist was an aspiration of mine since childhood.

I began formally studying art in the early 1980’s. I attended Kansas City Art Institute and Yale School of Art as an undergraduate, and received my BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After living in Chicago for many years, I moved to Philadelphia, where I received my MFA from Tyler School of Art.

I taught for several years throughout the Midwest and in southern California, at many colleges, art schools and universities, including: The Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College in Chicago, Washington University in St. Louis, California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, UC Irvine, and The University of Southern California.