Artist’s Statement
Our world seems to shatter and melt at once in recent years, and those years themselves emulsify to what feel like fleeting minutes. We grapple to stand firm and to balance. Koyaanisqatsi is the Hopi term for life out of balance, and we all identify strongly with that concept each time we watch the news, mask our faces, or watch temperatures and wars rising. The artist must at once feel one foot plunge into these rising waters and also feel one firmly hold the solid ground of the shore. Art is generated on the peripheral edge of each experience, standing back enough to record the experience itself in accessing a view of the whole, and yet, leaning forward into it enough to feel it in full, empathic force. I digest the sorrow and beauty in this current world by witnessing the sunrise over Maine’s ocean every morning, culling my memories of its healing presence into my paintings. I feel everything ever so deeply, and it generates my work. As a student of Eastern philosophy, meditating yogi since age 17, and as a painter all of my life, I seek a peace that I do not yet hold. I stand every day to the present in sunlight, atmosphere, and living color. (This is a present that can be held in a brush stroke). To crystalize this with B.K.S. Iyengar’s words: “Balance is the state of the present—the here and now. If you balance in the present, you are living in Eternity.”