artist statement:  thoughts on art and the making of images

I believe in the mystery and spirituality of art and its making.

Studying the art of the past is a way of communing with human history.  Attentiveness to the images of our past provides us with a way of engaging in an ongoing "conversation" about the ideas and concerns of our world, no matter what the subject.  Within this conversation time and space cease to matter and we come to understand that we may not be that different from those who lived in the past after all.

I believe that we all should posses a desire to see past ourselves – to have the desire to wrestle with the unknown.  Therefore, for me, painting is a journey, a series of questions rather than answers.  I seek to uncover unfamiliar truths through an unraveling of the mystery of what we think we know and through this process, to hopefully allow something greater than myself to emerge.

For me, the creation of an image can be the act of freeing a captive, a kind of redemption.  The making of art is an ongoing longing to seek a greater existence and to learn. Art can take us somewhere else, somewhere that embraces the mysterious and accepts that human reason may not always be capable of understanding.  The most important thing is that we never cease to search or question because it is through that search that we find freedom in the unknown and continue the struggle to relinquish what is for what could be.