Anais Nin said, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” This captures, for me, my reasons for painting. I get a second crack at seeing something by putting it down on canvas.
The figure is my anchor but abstraction gives me the argument I need. Dancing between figurative and abstract painting feels natural. Abstraction demands more active participation from the viewer while figurative work allows the viewer to participate by reading emotion from the gesture and filling in the story. With abstraction, with no figure with which to anchor, the viewer will often say, “I don’t know why I like/dislike it, but I do.” That means they are tapping into their non-verbal languages and simply trusting a feeling. Powerful connection there.
An artist is a translator. You take an emotion and transform it into another medium. It gains something during that exchange-a note resonates or a color relationship happens and the viewer/listener assigns it some emotion; soothing, vibrant or melancholy.
The scribblers, the scrapers, the clumpers, scratchers, drippers and meanderers are the people I look at and listen to the most. I’m drawn to the unfinished and unvarnished.
Letting evidence of the argument remain in the finished piece is vital for me. This is where the figure and abstraction meet in my work and I see no difference between either discipline.
