I’ve been busy preparing for the Indian Wells Arts Festival, creating lots of new work to display for next month. I love participating in art fairs because it inspires me to paint and make new things since I know I have a venue to display my paintings in, and there is an upcoming deadline. The pressure is on! It makes me feel a bit like I’m back in art school painting like crazy in preparation for a critique, and I thrive in that kind of environment. I’ll slowly be posting new paintings online and on Instagram as the festival approaches. Excited that I’ve started to make some new desert inspired landscapes! Very new for me, and a departure from my infatuation with the color green.
A statement about the recent works:
My current practice is a paradox between absence and presence.
Using watercolor or oil paint on paper, I distill a landscape down to its most essential elements and abstracted forms. The negative shapes take on a prominent role in the paintings, often creating silhouettes of human figures enmeshed in the surrounding landscape. Painterly gestures and mark-making techniques are juxtaposed with highly-rendered flora.
The process is exclusively additive, as each mark on the stark white surface cannot be erased or undone. The paintings allude to an influence of Chinese landscape painting, especially in their rhythms and intentional use of blank space, or “nothingness”. They convey “inner landscapes of the mind” more so than accurate, external ones- they are reflections of sanctuary and inner spirit. The paintings seek to highlight a sense of permanence within nature and the spiritual world, contrasted with the temporal quality of human existence.
