Imagined Light
Memories of Rome

Over the years my work has explored organic forms in nature. Whether representational or abstract, they reflect the intensity of my experience of both form and place. For several months in the fall of 2010 I returned to Rome where my love affair with Italy began almost forty years earlier as a Fulbright Fellow in Sculpture. While there I actually made little art on site but rather let the place envelop me and work its magic. At home once again in the studio I reflected on my experience as the work process began.

With these new paintings I continue my exploration of the emotional resonance of color. I continue to be drawn to work on paper for its texture, flexibility and abundance. Painting on paper has renewed my connection to drawing where the paper itself often creates the line. Working on a larger scale conveys the monumentality of the forms and the intensity of light and atmosphere around them.

Imagined Light consists of five very large paintings, together with five small studies and two companion pieces. The work springs directly from my wanderings through the ruins, parks and gardens of Rome where the Umbrella Pines in particular came to represent, for me, the city itself. I hope to bring a sense of my experience of light, place and time to the viewer through these paintings which are essentially landscapes of the mind.

Fertile Ground

The ocean is the mother of us all. Life begins in water. Salty water surrounds us in utero which is not so different from the experience of ocean creatures floating, carried along and nurtured in sacs and tide pools. All contain mysteries within. Fertile Ground represents a group of new paintings on paper from 2009.

My work focuses on exploring organic forms in nature - particularly the ways in which they reflect and echo one another in widely varying scale and context creating an ambiguity which challenges the viewer to bring personal associations to each piece. Moving between representation and abstraction, the work explores landscape and the body in deeply personal ways.