Artist Statement

I make drawings, and give them homes in my paintings. Humble in size, they begin their lives as graphite on paper, the result of a daily drawing practice that serves as meditation. With a full range of hardnesses and softnesses, I draw in cherished solitude, listening to the foundational sounds of my home as its walls contain me. As it creaks with age, heats and cools, apportions power and water, and protects me from weather I reflect with gratitude on the comfort and shelter it provides.

I’m interested in the way these small sounds become reciprocal flows of energy as they enter aural pathways to become experiences and memories.  At the same time, they result from the physics of energy as the technologies that fuel our comfortable homes do their work.

In my paintings, the particular visual language I’ve developed through quiet meditation and the subtleties of graphite transmutes and expands.  Kernels, mysterious almost-bodies, are centered like beating hearts and become encircled by oscillating waves, pulses, and staccato marks. In this way, the energetic event of a sound becomes like the birth of a star, a threshold crossing that propagates energetically outward while, through gravitational pressure, containing itself.  The aural becomes aura.