Artist Statement
My art comes out of the process of my life. From the beginning my focus has been on the human figure - an insatiable fascination with how people are put together and embody consciousness - how we exist in and out of space. If possible, I might make explicit the interior momentum and its coalescence with living: What Lacan would term "creating the symbolic out of the real" - though I only learned that way of seeing it recently; who knew I'd been doing it all along.
I paint and draw figures and lots of them. And I have done so even as I pass from one errant career arc to another, one crazed belief system to another, one thread of thought to another - in and out of what Deleuze would call black holes of subjectivity and molar means of capture, coursing along the line of flight - my line.
I begin works without any plan. And if I do formulate a plan - it is abandoned: perhaps it is too facile, perhaps my interest has waned, perhaps some new possibility has suggested itself in the lines materials.
I present here some results: the middling scrapings of my erstwhile castings. I've fused commentary perhaps from theology, poetry, literature, libraries, and machining. Sometimes I leave a word dangling on the page along with a figure, clothed or nude. Mostly female, but with the occasional male crawling in from the underbrush.
I received my BFA'84 and MFA'86 from the University of Georgia. Before that I was at Brevard College where I also majored in music. Music, though I left it (my pride lead me to believe I could major in music and art), still plays into my work - as I think of pieces as time compositions: as masses of notes in space a la Varesse or Boulez, especially the later's Pli Selon Pli.
This is what I do. As a chaplain I visited patients and drew while charting the visit; as a librarian I drew pushing the book truck through the stacks; sitting in a lecture or a meeting I draw. In the last days of a web company I worked for, I stretched a five by five foot canvas in my 8th floor office and painted a spring day in Greenwich Village, which I called a Last Judgment - apt description for a halcyon day where time shall be no more. Every where I've been in my nomadic life, drawings cover the walls - paintings lie over paint. Once living off an alley in a small apartment in Portales, NM, a person nearly caved my door in at 2 am. I painted through it. I painted a prayer for my soul to not be eaten up. These vignettes disclose a sense of how my art has drawn my life - as if I chose poverty and obscurity as a willing alternative to making sense.
