ARTIST STATEMENT

As a Production Designer in television and film, I have always been interested in creating art that combines both my love of studied realism with my attraction to flamboyant theatricality. I am thrilled by the technical genius of John Singer Sargent and awed by the uninhibited freedom of Pablo Picasso. I admire the brilliant narrative lines of N. C. Wyeth and am inspired by the distorted forms of Lucien Freud. I am drawn to powerful color that both seduces and assaults, that invites us to enter into the realm of the extraordinary, beyond what we think we know, see and hear- into the world inside of ourselves, into our dreams.

     For the past fifteen years I have worked exclusively with soft pastel on paper. Pastels unite drawing and painting: As in pencil work, I use fine lines of varying character to delineate and contain form. As in painting, I lay grounds of color to build layers of varied transparency, defining and separating objects. Lines surround, colors enfold. Soft pastel is immediate and direct, fine and coarse. It gives me what I want.

     My figurative work is truly a combination of the physical built world of my film and television career and the imaginary dreamscapes of my mind. The models are costumed actors on movie sets that I design and have constructed. I choose the paint colors, the backgrounds, the rugs, the chairs, the fish, the lamps, what the actors are holding—every detail of decor that also serves a larger thematic purpose as part of a movie. When the world of the movie collides with my own desires, I have to paint it.