My work began as meditative automatic painting. My focus was brush strokes, color interaction, line creation. Eventually symbols and figures began to appear in my paintings. I write a lot during the painting process, poetry and philosophy, conversations with myself. When I paint I do not plan the images or the composition. The objects I make are based off of the lines that come out of my brush, it is like someone else is painting the outlines for me and I just enhance them into forms.

 

My painting is a conversation with my subconscious. When I write down my poems and stories in my sketchbooks, those are separate than what I might write on a canvas. I’ll invent symbols and phrases and letters. Writing a symbol is like writing a letter or a word, some of my abstract works look like asiatic language characters. I interpret the symbols I paint after I have created the work.

 

In these paintings, I see my last two years falling in love with my ex partner and moving and living on Guam. The marlin we caught became a sweeping metaphor for all the effort I put in, for direction and travel and recognition of the massive power I have. The calamansi with lips is sexual and seductive and vampiric with red teeth. You can read themes of consumption and appetite, both sexual and visceral. The shinto gates represent my trip to Japan, and in them Isee future trips, the bisecting center pole is about duality, each gate no longer moving forward or back but with two different doors. The lamb represents my past self, innocence, with three haloes of different metals and the heart of a rose. Two branch antlers sprout like a tree of life crown, one in spring and one in summer, two hemispheres of the world.

 

The four seasons paintings are also representative of four places I have lived: Boise as spring, Alaska as summer, Guam as Autumn and New Mexico as Winter.

 

The Apple and the Pomegranate is about being an androgynous female and the quest for a male compliment, the idea of completion of myself through my own masculine energy overcoming the need for a partner. A serpent’s eye rests upon an apple with three seeds, three future children. A pomegranate sits without seeds, waiting for the seeds. Another stem has begun to grow from the fruit, possibly the male figure superimposed in the shadow of the female figure will grow ribs.

 

As I continue to develop my paintings, more about myself is revealed to me. Through this act of painting I Find a reaffirmation of self within the acknowledgement and exploration of my fears and memories, revealing my hidden emotions and desires and conflicts.