My new painting work focuses on themes and motifs developed over ten years in 25 mixed media sketchbooks. This new work is oil and cold wax medium collage on paper. The themes draw from imagery found in the natural sciences and psychology, to read a full statement about this work please scroll to the bottom of this page.
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The Scenic Route
For the past ten years I have been working daily in a series of mixed media sketchbooks, currently numbering 25 books. Through my long-term, spontaneous encounter with this format, I have discovered recurring themes and motifs. These forms have developed steadily over the years, growing into a surprisingly wild garden.
Recently, unruly seeds from this peculiar garden have blown across the boundaries of my working life as an artist. Among the first to germinate were an ongoing series of small cold wax and oil paintings on paper exploring my sketchbook themes and motifs. A key element in my sketchbooks has always been collage, and I soon found myself cutting these paintings into fragments and reconstructing them. By doing this, I was creating fresh and energetic encounters between the diverse forms.
When I began painting on top of the completed collages, I saw mysterious hybrids and anomalies emerge from this deliberate interaction and integration of imagery across the seams. A new kind of wholeness was made, one representing a deeper dialog between the conscious and unconscious mind, the organic and the geometric, unity and dissonance, the wild and the contained, a simple form and a complex field of psychic multiplicity.
No process I’ve engaged with has had a more formative influence on my artistic journey as daily, free work in sketchbook format. I think of my new large-scale painting work as an ideal comprehensive realization of this practice. It is for me the clearest embodiment of the discoveries I’ve made so far along the circuitous, invaluable pathways of the scenic route.
Traveling the scenic route takes time. It requires patience and attention, but most of all curiosity. The traveller trusts that these investments will pay off in wonderful things discovered. Certainly the goal is the journey itself and not the destination. I often marvel at how as soon as I feel I have arrived someplace final, a new and unexpected stretch of fresh road shimmers ahead into the glorious unknown. It is what I most appreciate about the revelatory, self-renewing art process I have lived and practiced all my life.