Art by Year
I make contemporary abstract paintings and sculptures. There are a few specific themes you will see running through the work: geometric repeating patterns, irregular shapes that become characters with their own qualities, making and breaking rules, and an obsession with color relationships. Sometimes my ideas manifest as cast concrete arches, sometimes as squiggly lines.
2011 Collection: Andiamo: This body of work reengages my research of Roman architecture. I study mathematical proportion, path, axis, and patterns in plans and elevations of buildings. I am interested in how these spherical clusters relate to human scale, as diagrammed by Vitruvius. I want to understand how a sacred spaces are created architecturally and sculpturally.
These artworks are abstractions of real architectural buildings from the Roman Empire. They are models for large-scale sculpture. I am interested in the paint and texture as a response to traditional surface decoration of domes in architecture. By constructing these shaped surfaces, I am creating sacred space for my own painting and drawing practice.
2010 Collection: Two large projects documented are an outdoor exhibition Carnival Balloon Game for Art City Austin 2010 and Wayfinding for a solo show at the Courtyard Gallery. Carnival Balloon Game is an interactive piece where participants use waterguns with pigmented water to shoot color at cast plaster shapes made from balloons that hang on a wood wall. The cast balloons in many different shapes looked very suggestive, and after they were shot with color, were used to make wall-hung pieces or trophies.
Wayfinding is a wall installation using mixed media in a 102′ long space at the Courtyard Gallery at the AT&T Conference Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Paper, paint, plaster and steel were used to represent the four elements: air, water, earth and fire. For fire, there are 10 compositional elements made from torch cut steel shapes taken from previous paintings and drawings. For air, clouds made from silver ink drawings on rice paper float at the top of the walls. For water, blue paint drips layer and interact with the other elements. For earth, spiraling cones cluster like trees or mountains, made from plaster cast from rubber molds of romanesco broccoli.
2009 Collection: The oil paintings from 2009 are accompanied by ink drawings and sculptures in mixed media. The artwork references systems of energy, quotes from novels, and resurfacing symbols for psychological behavior patterns. The sculpture materials include carved wood and steel using welding/grinding, water jet and laser jet cutting, and machine-fabricated parts and hand-made details.
2008 Collection: This series includes illustrating and stamping iconic shapes, and burning and branding into the panel surface. Patterns are created by repeating shapes and sometimes resizing the scale of the shape. Negative spaces and drops evolved into new characters.
2007 Collection: This series, titled Iterations, showed the evolutions of a shape through multiple processes, iterations, sizes and materials, in order to make icons out of what originated as quick gestures. The shapes originated as tiny clay models and then a color was selected for each shape. In some paintings, the shapes are used as stamps, or are enlarged and painted in a flat manner, or carefully rendered. Some shapes were forged in steel and powder coated to produce wall sculpture. The abstract shapes that were chosen for this series are not seen eidetically as referencing real objects. They have particular qualities that produce their distinct characters that transferred in each iteration.
2006 Collection: This was a germination period of making paintings very slowly, making at most one mark per session, and spending a lot of time looking. I experimented with making models of repeating patterns in nature and planning a future installation of three dimensional work.
2005 Collection: I experimented, painting over 60 small and large oil paintings on panel. I allowed myself to explore how the perception of a color shifts in relation to the colors that surround it, without worrying too much about the preciousness of the results. The process allowed for a state of being open to change and reacting to context. Part of this is the way these paintings came about, appreciating that they were mirrors of my own thinking. They are abstract evidence, records of my always growing understanding of the world and my thought process.
1999-2004 Collection: During this time, I was researching war history. I took several trips to the Normandy region of France to document the remaining modular cast concrete German war bunkers that were used to occupy France during WWII. They were elegant, efficient sculptural designs. They remain as a symbol of occupation, like a scar, and erode into the landscape and have new buildings developing around them. I took hundreds of photos of the bunkers, of eroding boats, and made paintings, prints, drawings and sculpture models from the images I saw.
1998-1999 Collection: Most of this work was in response to research in Italy, where I was, of course, amazed by seeing painting in its context of architecture. The architectural proportions and shapes related so carefully to the human scale to give an entirely meaning to the images displayed on the surface. So I studied architectural proportion and scale, and made a series of artworks about that.
