Artist’s Statement
This particular work is a meditation on the sharp edges of ignorance. The viewer may come to interesting and personal reflections on the state of nature and our personal responsibility to it. For me, the creation of art is about finding meaning and purpose in the observed world and to convey those thoughts and concerns to others by means of aesthetic and historical references.
My work illustrates the ways that my voice and thoughts become inextricably linked to the process of seeing and the results of close observation. My images are often as much a result of the arrangement of “abstract” principles of line, form, and pattern as they are based on realistic morphology. In place of mirroring the world as it is, I would rather create a kind of reality that is rich with analogies. One thing may be many things. A tree is more than a tree; it is a whole universe that resonates with possibility.
From a very young age, I have found the natural world a compelling and mysterious realm. The textbooks and guidebooks that document it, filled with images at once unreal and exacting in their specificity, were a staple of my youth. I discovered then that, through art, one is able to stop time and motion, to see what is usually unseen. In a drawing of a bird, for example, we can understand the appearance of a bird much better than in the field where it is constantly in motion. In contrast, in viewing a drawing, we can understand little of how a bird really moves, eats, mates, and lives. In order to communicate aspects of the world, artists must reduce the complex into diagrams and symbols, losing information in the process of gaining it.
Viewing the arc of my career, it is an indisputable fact that Nature, both real and imagined, represents the core of my interest and practice. My goal has always been to create work that, through the use of symbol and technique, has visionary significance to the viewer.
