EDUCATION
BA,
Knox College
Art and Biology
Phi Beta Kappa
MFA,
Brooklyn College, CUNY
Drawing and Painting
MSILS,
Pratt Institute
Information and Library Science
INFLUENCES/INSPIRATIONS
Roman
Still Life
Sanchez Cotan
Jasper Johns
John Peto
Walter Murch
Manny Farber
Pierre Bonnard
Claude Monet
Art has always been a presence in my life. Growing up in Illinois, I lived
next door to my grandparents who seemed to bring craft and creativity
to almost everything. If there was a need for something, they would often
make it themselves or take a store-bought object and add their own customized
touch. Style was less of a commodity; it was something you made on your
own.
My grandmother practiced all of the usual home arts - knitting, embroidery, sewing. I have a vivid memory of watching her paint tiny flowers onto a set of white porcelain cups and saucers. My grandfather had a basement workshop, with table saws and big drilling machines and a lathe where he made wood furniture. It smelled like sawdust and turpentine and when I was down there alone, in the dim light from two small casement windows, the room always seemed to me to hum a little bit - to vibrate with potential energy and a desire to be put to use.
My father had a basement workroom in our house as well. Used at one time as a darkroom, it was crammed with the remnants of former hobbies: tools, electronic gear, scraps of leather, chemistry test tubes - all objects for childish curiosity and scrutiny. The most impressive item, however, was an old photo enlarger. Though my dad's interest in darkroom photography had waned, he still used the enlarger from time to time as a drawing tool. Instead of enlarging photos, he used it to make blown-up tracings and drawings of cartoon characters for me and my brothers. I would stand next to him in the dark, staring at the puddle of light as the image grew and contracted while he focused the lens. I watched as he followed the line of the projection with a pencil onto big sheets of white paper. It was like having our own personal coloring books.
As I got older, I also worked in the basement room, fiddling with hobby kits and science fair projects, hunched over the glow of the enlarger. I was drawn to that dark, windowless space in the basement, and also a little afraid of it. It too had a hum. Though it felt like a presence, it was too vague to define, like a fog of inspiration that was always present and hovered just below the level of complete awareness. I imagined it hovering there, that not-quite-conscious energy, even when the room was empty - like in the middle of the night when the lights were off and the house was quiet - still humming in some kind of disney-esque fantasia.
Many of those darkroom materials, including the enlarger, have migrated over the years to my various homes and still remain with me. Potential props for study and still life theatre, they are also spiritual reminders of that basement energy.
In college I studied art and biology, learning to work from observation
in both the laboratory and the studio. For me, both disciplines are about
taking things apart and putting things together and both taught me the
importance of looking.
After college, I moved to New York City to study art full time. Living in a large city, especially New York, is a montage experience. Most of the time, you see the world at street level, on foot, where your perspective changes only as fast as you can walk, or in the subway, underground, where long stretches of darkness are interrupted by strobe-like bursts of light as you pass from tunnel to station. The city is a series of still pictures, accumulated slowly or in rapid succession.
While in graduate school, I discovered the compositions of the 19th century American trompe l'oeil painters and began to focus my attention on still life painting. The verticality of their picture space mimicked the walls on which they hung, and showed me a way to liberate my own compositions from the limitations of traditional table top arrangements. I began to think more about the space within my own paintings and what kind of objects I felt should populate it.
I was fortunate in that my first job had been working in the college library. Having gotten my first library card before I was ten, this was like being paid to work and play at the same time. I love the stacks of books, the rubber stamps, the special tools for labelling, the mechanics of the card catalog - all of the objects and activities that involve running a library. As I made my way through graduate school and beyond, I continued to work in libraries, which became my research laboratories for subject matter. I spent my days surrounded by books and information. Information became an object; diagrams, icons, and words began to function as legitimately for me as apples and oranges.
Painters often talk about the space of a picture - does it try to mirror a real space, does the picture feel like a window into another world, another view, do the people or objects or shapes within it feel whole, do they have volume and weight. Spatially, my compositions began to represent what I think of as my mindspace - the area in my imagination where of all the objects and icons that I'd seen and researched met and merged with thoughts and memories.
I think of these still lifes as looking glass paintings, like Alice and her looking glass house; things in the mirror look the same and yet something else is going on. The plane of the canvas becomes the mirror where I am on one side touching the surface with a brush and on the other side, an object or an idea touches back. They are paintings of shallow spaces, inhabiting a neutral zone just in front of and behind the wall on which they hang, asking the viewer to stand still for a moment, to see what's reflected there.
In 1996 I moved to Northern California where the montage of static images
has been replaced by the rolling panorama: the view from a moving car
window. Close-ups and quick cuts have been replaced by the long shot and
the wide perspective.
Since moving I have felt an insistent push to address the nature and the landscape that surrounds me, to find the metaphor that will relate it to what I've done before and provide a map for future endeavors. The genre of landscape painting had always overwhelmed me. I'd always been most comfortable with a scale of one-to-one, where objects in my paintings were the same size as you might find them in life. Yet landscape on a life-size scale quickly grows out of control. How can you simultaneously convey the immensity of a tree and the delicacy of a leaf? How do you frame it and make it meaningful? How can you convey something so epic and awesome?
I now live in San Francisco and have made Golden Gate Park my new research laboratory. I've come to see the park as a conceptual hybrid, a cross between the beauty of structure and planning which was the basis for my still life work in NYC and the fluid, random chaos which characterizes the natural countryside. The park has a boundary and a defined scope, it is a cultivated chaos. As I bike and walk through its gardens and paths, my mind space fills with a mental map that is growing in depth and detail over time. This series of pastels and paintings, taken together represent my mental road map, the physical artifacts of time and space that summarize my daily conversation with the park, the latest additions to my caravan.
