ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
In March of 2018, I had a biopsy done, and it came back positive. It was a significant tumor, but curable, requiring extensive surgery. Intensive recovery would be six months to a year. Surgery was in April, radiation treatment and the months immediately after, were brutal. There were numerous things I focused on to keep me going. My family, my teaching and my work. By my work, I mean painting for the most part. It is my life’s work and it is not finished.
As soon as I could paint again, I did. Painting was enthralling and exhillarating, as much as it ever had been. It was truly exciting to place every brushstroke. The image, a dog in action, captured some of that feeling. On the other hand, the image is just a framework for what ultimately is a more personal process . To build something with the success of the whole dependent on each mark. Cruciality in each of the smallest actions. Yet, to say I control it completely would be false. Painting is for me a product of directed inertia. Each painting is a process that has a half-life, until the energy to make things fit into the whole, dissipates, and then fades away completely. Paintings have a beginning and an end, not as a narrative, but as a container for human activity.
This activity is at once calculating and intuitive, fluid and interrupted, specific and very much about the whole. It is also what makes me, me. The process of painting actualizes some part of the self that needs to observe, to calculate and to act intuitively, and with exactness. It’s a materialization of capacities, abilities and gestures. Yet, more importantly, it is as if each stroke is a breath and as though each painting is a record of my breathing, or my being alive.
Painting again, was the actualization of still being alive, taking breaths, seeing, touching and feeling.
