Distress Signals

Another Life, oil on linen, 10" x 30"

My work is about Eros, celebrating passion and paradox. Manifestations of Eros, the life force, in art as in life, serve as means by which we not only inhabit our humanity more fully, but also connect with the infinite. My work encourages revealing and integrating all aspects of our being. It is intended to be felt and contemplated. Contemplation mitigates the immediate impression revealing clarity, ambiguity, complexity, boldness, delicacy, darkness, light and shadow: a full spectrum of paradox. When the piece resonates exactly, it is like music, the vibration of the tiny strings of which we are made, of which everything is made.

The process of creating these is a journey of discovery. While this series shares with my other abstract works in collaborating with the unconscious, the conversation here is simpler, less modulated, less refined. Each painting begins as an improvisation. I start with a gesture that feels like pure expression, like a word that is absolutely definite and yet without form. Stepping back from the painting, I consider my next contribution to the dialogue. I may simplify or organize what is already there, or I may introduce another statement. An additional statement creates another layer, and in eliding the two the painting unfolds in some way I could not have foreseen. In resolving these, I seek not just harmony, but also some feeling that resonates. I know that the painting is done when it stops calling to me, it feels settled, and at it’s best it resonates with something inside me so precisely that I say, sometimes even out loud: yes, that’s it exactly.

Distress Signals
This series is the most immediate of my work, my most direct and unfiltered paintings. They are affirmations of passion, of exuberant and uncrushable humanity. Begun as a response to a crisis in my life, I found that colors and marks expressed clearly where words were inadequate or unavailable. These paintings erupted from me when I attempted to diminish my own humanity in order to fit into the outlines of someone else’s design. They emerged from a cauldron of containment, erupting more forcefully and fiercely because of the efforts at containment. I have been asked why they don’t seem angry. There is anger that is alive – not sullen or repressed or vindictive, but full and passionate and vital. So anger? By the time the paint left my brush the anger had transformed itself from rage at denial to an insistent affirmation and celebration of existence.