I consider being an artist a way of living, and a daily invention. Being an artist is my attempt to engage the world fully, on my own terms, through paint. It is a continuing exploration by, and of, the imagination.

I’m not trying to make a statement. In fact, I’m not really sure what I want to say in my art until I’ve said it. For me, the work has to take on a heartbeat, something that can try and survive in the world without me.

It is essential that I don’t know what is going to happen in a painting. I believe you can’t think it up. It has to come has a result of “moving toward something”, a constant life-affirming process. The work is actually / simply the accumulation of a visual discussion that endeavors to move in the direction of clarity.

This new body of work – titled grace + nepenthe is a visual discussion concerning my evolving ideas about GRACE – or exploring how my life intersects with concepts of GRACE. It is a search for a sense of tranquility and calm – peacefulness surviving the conditions of contemporary chaos, risking delight in a cynical world. These works are a collection of seemingly incompatible ideas about:

desire,

rejection,

beauty,

drinking,

Glacier National Park,

forgetting and remembering – (nepenthe and pentimenti),

full and empty – and the advantages of both,

inevitability – death, sorrow,

clusters of events,

and states of grace, among others.

This work is a result of contemplating the interconnectedness of all of these thoughts.

(NEPENTHE is a word first found in Homer’s Odyssey. It describes an ancient Egyptian potion that eliminates all sorrow through forgetfulness, moving the drinker away from pain and toward GRACE. But  the idea of “Nepenthe” also begs the question of the necessity for human suffering in understanding the world).

I love to invent forms that speak to me visually and poetically about the simple and complex thoughts in my mind. I’m interested in forms that attempt elegance but celebrate awkwardness. This body of work, more than the others that came before, was driven by an anxious, and necessary state of uncertainty in search of GRACE.