My paintings begin with chaos. Oh! I have so much fun making that mess. I spatter and spray, dribble and collage until chaos abounds. Then I sit back and look. The looking can take minutes or days. When I see what the paint tells me to paint I begin the process of organizing the chaos with value, line and color. The result is an expression which comes from my heart. It would be easy to edit out all that is meaningful by judging an inspiration as too sentimental, too complicated, funny or just plain too crazy to paint. Wrestling with both angels and demons, I paint a world with my own unique symbolic language.

Painting affirms from my love of the tactile world, the world of surfaces, and the inner world of emotions. The paint becomes my micro-universe where I play with textures, rhythms of line and patterns of form, and, more importantly, the duality of creation and destruction. I layer the paint and images to create real depth in the pictorial surface. Primitive art inspires my work in its disregard for anatomical correctness and illusionary effects of perspective. An Egyptian frontal view of the shoulders, an Aboriginal dot, an Assyrian eye facing forward in a facial profile and an Anasazi headdress can all be found in my work. Much inspiration comes from the work of Paul Klee, Picasso and Chagall who were each inspired by primitive art.

The imagery sometimes reflects the outer world of my life in Utah with my family or friends, but more accurately is a reflection of the inner experience of this mad and joyful journey called life. I wonder about this “humanness” I share with all the people who have come before me and who will come after me. Through these simple drawings and rich layering of texture, the painting speaks beyond culture and time, exploring simple relationships. They explore the places where my consciousness overlaps and merges with the consciousness of others and my search for wholeness and connection is reflected in a symbolic language others can easily experience.