“Naturally we think ourselves more capable of reaching the center of things than of embracing their circumference.”   ~ Blaise Pascal

I paint to embrace the circumference of what I cannot understand, to inhabit the silence of our innate question, “What is truth?”   Mystery is my subject; she dwells in the quiet spaces between artist intention and viewer reception, signifier and signified, among other places.   Tension moves my brush—tension between reason and intuition, self and other, faith and doubt.

I see abstract representation as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of life, a web of unified paradoxes and seeming contradictions that weave beautiful patterns before my intuition.   For me, the creative process is equally as important as the living image.   Photography provides an insightful metaphor: a multi-layered surface, applied with a palette knife or hand, acts as film which I patiently develop with a brush, contrasting values to reveal otherwise dormant forms.   The result is a still-frame of what I perceive from the circumference.

I value the artist who genuinely seeks to communicate truth, whether he/she knows much or little of its content and medium.    Around and between my brushstrokes I’ve sometimes heard the following: may we respect the integrity of Mystery, not seeking to pin her down, not to kill her, but to allow her to gently land upon our finger and to take flight when the wind calls. . .may our destination reside in the journey, and may humility always be the grounds of our learning. . . may we travel both directions of vulnerability’s two-way street, and may we distinguish good and bad fears: those rightly constructed for our protection and those behind which we complacently hide from risk. . . may we submit ourselves to the hands of experience, the great sculptor, and may we not suffer the weight of a blank canvas but confidently make the first mark. . . and, finally, that the ether is sufficient to support the weight of doubt.

What do you hear?