“All There in Black and White”
I show up to paintings as I would a huge breaker, rush to the wind and fling myself into the wave or the work. The canvases are large, between 3x4 foot and 4x6 foot. However, when I’m metaphorically crawling onto the sand with a back scraped raw from undertow, coughing up my guts, I curl around a 6” square sketchbook of collage. I explore what’s broken with synonyms, clawing the rotting skin of words away, going deeper and deeper until I find peace. Working primarily with Shizen paper, dried palette papers and up cycled envelopes, I push images to define the words and emotions. The first few pages slog around in the morass of amorphous feelings until they find purchase and the concepts become clearer. By the time a book or two is full, I’m amazed at what I discover by allowing the images to perform as mirror.