Located on the border between figuration and abstraction, my paintings are battlefields. There are countless struggles being fought on their surface, chief among them the battle between loss and optimism, a conflict between formlessness and structure. This is a place where hard-edged painting has delivered a sucker punch to biomorphic abstraction; figure and ground are dueling; there is a food fight between drawing and painting; and every form is in danger of melting away in the brightly hued goo of dripping acrylic.
The specific nature of each painting is determined by the quality of multiple, rapidly executed pours of acrylic paint. These pours are followed by the slow build-up of a network of lines, drawn in marker. This working methodology forces two very different types of improvisatory mark-making to co-exist; one painted and one drawn. At one moment I am mimicking an anxious Pollock; in the next moment I am caressing the surface with delicately drawn lines. In these passages of drawing I straddle childlike gender roles as happy hearts and flimsy flowers give way to bullet traces and gunfire.
For four years I have been making paintings that incorporate images of war, with central forms that resemble tanks and forts. Gun barrels poke out from innumerable openings in the poured paint, spears are lurking, and yet, each over-armed combatant, confused by smoke and slop, misses its target. The depicted violence is hopelessly frozen and impossible to resolve. As much as these paintings have been about the world and the wars outside of my studio, they are also a metaphor for the battles within the creative process and all its inherent pleasures and contradictions: trying to make something from nothing, intention from accident, illusion from flatness.