I am a full-time artist working exclusively in watercolor. My paintings are firmly rooted in modernism while demonstrating my passion for realism. Akin to contemporary realism, my style calls forward the beauty, resilience, and paradox that informs our experience. I am a self-taught artist whose interests have always been aligned with art though my professional life for many years followed a different course.
My current body of watercolor paintings reflects my interest in different cultures, exploring what comprises the life and customs of cultural groups, and how these relate to our own lives. Residing in central Mexico over the past year, as well as traveling in Southeast Asia, Turkey, the northern Mediterranean and Morocco, has provided me with endless inspiration and insights that have found their way into my work.
My paintings begin with a series of reference photographs, taken to collect not only the physicality of a subject but also the feeling of the place. The spirit and feel of a subject are to me essential qualities that help to bring out the "life" of my paintings rather than merely copying what I see. Since many of my paintings represent fleeting moments in time I find it more practical, and even necessary, to work within my studio rather than on site, manipulating images as needed to build the strongest composition possible. I proceed from an initial value sketch, made with graphite, that helps me determine areas of dark to anchor the composition against the lighter values. Once the composition and values are settled, I make a line drawing of the basic subject, avoiding over-drawing that would inhibit the fluidity of my painting process. I work almost exclusively on 300 lb. watercolor paper, usually cold press, as I find it to be more forgiving and performs well even with heavy water and repeated manipulation. I use a fairly limited selection of high-quality tube watercolor paints, mixing most of the secondary colors to maximize the interplay of pigments, which I feel is a wonderful part of the excitement of painting with watercolors.
My approach to batik elevates this ancient craft to fine art. Batik originated in the world of craft where people create objects that contribute a sense of grace and beauty to their daily lives. I try to bring forward the history of that desire for commonplace beauty and use it as a support in developing my own imagery. As I work this craft into fine art I feel a kinship with people who engage in this everyday pursuit of elegance and beauty.
I follow the strong pull of realism, not because of some conceit that it shows us what actually is but because it can provide a simple, personal witness to our world. The intricate world of visual detail feeds my creative spirit, and that is reflected in my highly detailed work. I see batik as having great, unexplored potential. I found in it a remarkable way to paint pursuing realism. Batik offers a unique, highly textured, graphic quality that can operate to suggest three-dimensional space while maintaining a two-dimensional or "flat" quality that pays attention to the surface. Also, in batik the image and the cloth become a fully integrated thing. There is no surface decoration in batik. The image is established in the fiber of the cloth. I find that to be a very powerful idea.
At some point, through batik, I stopped seeing art history in the same way. The question no longer was "What's new?" or "What's next?" but "What is important?" Batik helped me to frame an answer. It soon became a media with intense, personal meaning. It serves to assist me as I explore my vision. For me, that vision was the pursuit of imagery that walks the line between exotic and everyday, using the realistic portrayal of people engaged in the activities of life (sometimes in surprising contexts) to focus on a point of emotional response and identification. There are universal qualities that reveal themselves as we examine the human form in even the most exotic setting. These qualities can help to tease out an understanding across cultures. I use contemporary realism in this way to engage with the people of the world. It's an approach I've come to describe as "World Batik."
Batik painting offers solutions for me. It provides an escape valve that allows me to see the history of art differently. It comes from the world of craft and that appeals to me in many ways: as communal, as beauty in the utilitarian, as an anti-elitist alternative. Batik is undiscovered territory. It has magical qualities of obscurity and revelation. The finished work is only seen in its entirety at the very end of the process, when the wax is removed and the image revealed.