ARTIST STATEMENT

Echo in progress

Contemporary artists have the liberty to tell a story in which the narrative is not imposed.  Such stories can speak to everyone.  My favorite works of art are those that can impart a common experience or emotion to any audience, even when removed from their native context.  These works often rely on materials that transcend our most immediate surroundings, such as myth, the collective unconscious or nature in its broadest sense.

My guiding principle in all creative work is balance.  In making pictures I strive for a balance between imaginative and reactive.  I love works of art that stress composition without sacrificing a sense of improvisation.  I also seek a balance between content and style - works that simultaneously engage the mind and impress the eye.  In modern art I am most drawn to the pieces that seek to reconcile the objective and non-objective traditions – works that acknowledge an historical continuum while at the same time exercising the freedoms born out of the anti-establishment impulses of the twentieth century.

For example, in some of my work I juxtapose landscapes with inscapes, playing with double-exposure effects in an attempt to depict my physical surroundings and their effect on my imagination simultaneously.  Or, I have made various attempts to depict, in a series, the Library of Congress Classification System, a modern device that, though it only seeks to classify library materials, virtually mirrors the mind of man from the primordial to the present.  I have treated this highly rationalized system in a non-objective way.  These representations are freely associated, distorted, abstracted and exaggerated – a personal taxonomy of response.

My goal is to infuse a narrative conception, given its traditional tools of form and perspective, with the late twentieth-century sensibility that art should not dictate experience but serve as a place to start.