Statement

Thinking like a composer:

My art is a reflection of my personal evolution from my early years as a musician, my later experience in design and finally in various art mediums.  I can’t say that as a young child I loved to draw because I didn’t and I still don’t in spite of taking multiple drawing classes to try to develop that love.  And, I found no joy in realistic representation in painting.  I have always wanted to break free and do something that for me was more expressive.  Although no longer a musician, my roots are deep and I think more like a composer.

When I first waded into the visual arts, my early steps (other than a paper sculpture of a mandala) were creating stripe compositions.  I could have easily made endless colorful and harmoniously designed patterns simply by translating the timbre plus the rhythm and pitch patterns in poetry and music into colorful strips of assorted widths.  The designs were destined to look and feel much like the music or poetry that was their origin.

I also did and still do collage, but always develop the images as if they were motifs in music that call for repetition and development of multiple variations.

Combining opposing visual elements as if they were counterpoint in a contrapuntal composition is possibly my favorite technique (with big plans for the future).

As I use many different techniques of composition in my art, I have attempted to catalog my art according to the method used that is most relevant to the individual work.

Visual tendencies:

My painting style is expressionistic, abstract, personal, held together by a strong aesthetic sensibility and could possibly be characterized as lyrical abstraction.  Much of my work is rhythmical and flowing.  When a car accident took away the fine coordination in my hands required of a  pianist, I didn’t go into depression because I had always wanted to be more creative.  I was ready to find something that was true to my own feelings.  As a child, I was never allowed to run and play, dancing was strictly forbidden, and even as a teenager, sports were not allowed.  It was inevitable that as an adult with free choice, I would want my art to have energy and movement, and that my artistic ideal would be something that looked natural and effortless, like the performance of an accomplished dancer.

I love color and do not feel limited to any palette.

Although I enjoy exploring multiple materials in my art, metal has been especially important.  In the metal girls innumerable concepts of self are explored while simultaneously doing an exhaustive search in what is possible with innumerable metals and treatments.  Female strength is brought to a dazzling light in the torso series utilizing digital C-prints on Endura Metallic Paper.  And in paintings, different types of metal leaf are sometimes incorporated.

Although typically not intentional, often my work is autobiographical and at times replete with personal symbols.

The methods of composition and whether clean or messy, etc. is integral to the message.

I sometimes employ something I call parallelism. This concept originated in my mind from an indelible experience in college where by chance distinctly different piano compositions blasted from grand pianos in adjacent practice rooms and was so gloriously amazing and complimentary that students came spilling out of their caves and into the hallway.  Similar to the joy of choral music and rock from adjacent radio stations at once, or Charles Ives, or the master, J. S. Bach himself.  But somehow it took the two pianos, and not the Bach I laboriously practiced to make an impression.  Early on in my art experience, all I wanted to do was cut up opposing art and make it work.  Even later, in The Mind is in the Body, two distinct mediums (painting and silkscreen) are worked separately and clash harmoniously (I trust).

It is of great interest to me that poetry, speech, music and art can often literally translate from one form to the other.

I am always trying to combine the sensual and expressionist aspects of art with the structural and pattern finding tendencies of the mind. This I think of as sensual intellectualism.  I enjoy how alive composition can make me feel.  In an abstract painting that begins as hedonistic debauchery with luscious mark making material, quickly I am cut off and find myself face to face with myself in a chess game. Each move calls for another and the complexity and risks of each move build.  What will winning look like? And, for not winning? Those works will continue to give the mind something to work out in sleep.

But you might reason that these mentioned characteristics still don’t give you a simple coherent view.  A mature artist is supposed to be easily identified in a brief flyover at a low altitude, but still from a pretty far distance.  What if you see what looks like maybe more than one art style?  I guess you just keep flying if you don’t care what you miss.  There are always more artists, right?

But isn’t life pretty complex?  If an artist’s brain has taken in multiple influences and feels the need to communicate life’s experiences in multiple ways, so be it.  J. S. Bach did sonorous organ music with religious intent that included chorale preludes, fantasias, preludes, toccatas, fugues and more; in his music for clavier, he did not only preludes and fugues, but even abstracted popular French dance music.

Why can’t a lesser mortal do lyrical chess games, parallelisms (or contrapuntal compositions), cacophonies, reductions, transpositions, repetitions, explorations of the same motif in a different style, and last but not least, the metal girls (see themetalgirls.com).  You will notice the same soul behind all of these expressions.