Several years ago I began to paint my bed, which was initially in response to reading a line by Gaston Bachelard, “everything in the life of a poet is germinal”. The idea that everything can be germinal, or that everyday experiences can be source material, resonates with the connection that I seek between life and painting and the idea that perception holds potential for new iterations of experience. The intimate and almost universal space of a bed has become a platform for metaphors and ideas; it's a space that can bend towards dream space, landscape, absence, or presence. Each painting deals with it’s own problem, idea, or reference, including literature, layered reality, memory, the importance of music, or simply that light is not still and I am not still. “Faldum”, in which a figure is dissolving and aligning to form a mountainous shape, references a short story by Herman Hesse along with Cezanne's “View of Mont Sainte-Victoire”. The painting titled "Wolf Interval" alludes to the unconcealed visual dissonance in the shifting light as day turns to evening. Objects find their way into the paintings as things that I see as potentially transformative, such as a radio, a plant, or a book. The objects become symbols and their symbolic meaning then influences the visual. Radios show up along with patterns that could be read as visualized static; the painting event and the form find a way to connect.

Light moves through the space of the room in a continuous wave, the paintings uncover overlapping moments caught in suspension. Simultaneity, coalescence, or crystallization of an emotional light are the result of shifting, decision, and the excitement that comes from the unmapped course each painting takes.

_______________________________________________________________


2008-09 (excerpt)
Themes of restlessness, hope, death, and dreams underlie my work. Visual shifts occur as a result of trying to grasp the constant changing of location, form, and color within the space, and from my own movements and shifts as I work. The repeated use of a vertical division of the canvas is in one sense funny and references the relationship and contrast of character between my husband and I (a morning person versus a night person), in another sense it is about the difficulty and precariousness of coexisting parallel worlds and their point of contact. Visual collisions result when forms or events battle for location in a painting and become charged occurrences.

Working from observation presents an interesting challenge to me; how to paint images in a way that deals with contemporary issues in painting, where do invention and observation intersect in a meaningful way, how to create new forms in paint? For myself, renewal and understanding of the world found through painting must point towards the possibility of bringing something new to painting while satisfying a need for intuition, namelessness, and speaking through color.