Artist’s Statement
I create constructed digital images that blur the line between painting and photography. This duality of aesthetics is an essential component of my approach to art and life. I am drawn to the polarities of beauty and decay, the contrived and the natural, the excessive and the elegant.
My compositions begin with originally sourced imagery selected from photographs I shoot in my studio or on location in mid-coast Maine, where I live half the year, or my neighborhood and surroundings in Tel Aviv, Israel, where I reside the other half, as well as on my extensive travels here and abroad.
Undergirding the natural beauty and poetic tone of the images is the scrawl of graffiti and decay found on urban walls. The images often appear otherworldly, as if in a dream. The elegiac mood and brooding nature of the work reflects the collective angst of our times, rife with political, social, and environment distress. Some of the images conjure a mythic, idyllic place where the ethereal beauties of the natural and made worlds coexist in harmony. Layered imagery, soft veils of color, and abraded textures suggest the patina of age and the endurance of beauty in troubled times.
As feminist poet and scholar Claire Raymond has written: “These are ultimately landscapes of reclamation, reclaiming the feminine, reclaiming trash, graffiti, death, and forgetting, for the purpose of photographic remembrance.”
