I am obsessed with brushstroke. At fourteen, I aspired to be a housepainter, because I longed to do large brushstrokes. I have always been drawn to sports or activities that require a certain powerful stroke from my arm. I was a great tennis player and even taught it. So I’m drawn to physicality in painting. Then there was fencing with barbed wire and tall wooden fence wrapped around the perimeter of the house in which I grew up, or the bars that kept the bears in across the street in the park. It was a bit dangerous where I grew up. People robbed us constantly. When I lived in New York, there were often bars on the windows. Where I am now is safe, and there are no physical bars, but I am all too aware of the “bars” of my own making. The painted stripes of my Nightline series are simultaneously extensions and enclosures, a contradiction which pleases me.
My palette in these works represent me with my shadow self. I am now painting the essence of what I am interested in, which is still the shadows — linear shadows pulling me into the deepest darks. Deep indigo, black, brown and green umber, some reds and yellows are my dark colors, mixed from the darkest dark up through mid grey tones. I do think of darkness in and of itself. I do not see it as the antithesis of light. I see darkness as a complete world. I want to know about darkness, grayness, and I want to mix that with just a bit of hope. The verticality of the stripes strikes a chord in me that feels appropriately totemic, vigorous, epiphanic, and dramatic. The stripes have a dark edge to them, and still there is a flicker of light within, which can be taken as a metaphor for humanity. In the unification of the stripe lives the hope for the good in humanity. Strength in numbers creates power. On a micro level, we as individuals are the stripe, and the macro level is the combined stripes representing the human collective.
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