Artist's Statement 2017
I have come to a point in my practice where I am working in what I think is pure painterly abstraction. My current paintings come from how I see and from my inner life. It is a very personal expression but not subjective. The work I am doing comes from the contemplation of painting possibilities and resolving the unforeseeable things that come up in the making of a painting. It’s about going too far with a work and bringing it back from ruin. It involves exploring what colours do with each other when combined on the playing field of a flat surface and presents this for contemplation and interpretation. Most importantly, I am not consciously or otherwise presenting any narrative or expressing any cultural, political or historical commentary or experience. This is my personal aesthetic and it does not affect how I appreciate other forms of visual art. Ideas for my work used to come from observations around me: my domestic environment, my travels, my location in Toronto. Later these observations became the beginnings for abstract paintings. Ideas came from the same sources but were used as structures to explore arrangements of colour and pattern, which was now more interesting to me. My work was becoming abstract but I still had to start with something. To be truly abstract I began to make paintings that started with nothing in particular: a field of colour; some brush strokes; an arrangement of stripes. My current paintings grow out of these beginnings and eventually become something but intentionally avoid conventional narratives or representations. |