My artwork is primarily grounded in painting but moves fluidly between painting and the fabrication of objects to installations. My paintings are done on copper surfaces, thin sheets which have been drawn into, embossed, riveted and stretched over strainers or wooden forms. I paint the surfaces with patinas, oils, and enamels. The surfaces are encrusted with information, such that even the more sculptural objects act as paintings in the round. I am interested in the naturally- occurring processes of the patinas providing a foil to the more subjective act of painting.

My recent paintings begin as tondos, or oval shapes, suggestive of a mirror. These paintings depict nature both as record or document, and as library.  I have been interested in referencing the natural world through two points of entry:  the raw materials of copper metal and acids that act as a stand-in for wild nature, and the human interpretation of nature as pictures. These paintings serve as "worlds" that model our prevailing experience with nature.  Patina fields or photo-reactive cyanotype surfaces create a raw, wild environment that is inhabited by pictures of nature, cultural imprints that claim the space, civilize it.  The Renaissance belief of painting as a ‘mirror of nature’ has been extended to reflect back a constructed view of the universe.

A mirror reflects not the self but the image of the self.  In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the construction of the ego begins with the recognition of a self in the mirror.  It is the point at which the world separates into the me/not me. I am interested in the idea of the positioning of the ego in an attempt to locate the self amidst the incomprensibility of the external world at large.  Only a dismantling of ego merges the interior with the exterior into a non-dualistic whole world.

Details of human presence such as small suburban homes, or tiny faces create an entry point, a locus of comfort in a vast realm.  Scale is subverted as microscopic forms loom gigantic.  A system or network of strands and webs connects elements and defines the depth of the space.  The voids are filled with particles and vapors.  They are not empty.

A most telling moment of the past year came with the completion of the Human Genome Project, the mapping of the human genetic sequence. According to the central dogma of DNA theory, humans, as the most complex organism on earth, were expected to have an enormous gene count, predicted to number 100,000.  Instead, in the end, the human gene count numbered just around 30,000, just about as many genes as a mustard weed.  I feel this is significant in revealing that humans are but a tiny part of a vastness beyond comprehension, connected to every weed, and no more, nor no less important.

Like the paintings, my installations also involve elements of drawing and phenomenology. Double/Split, which was shown in two variations in Helsinki, Finland, Bratislava, Slovakia, and three US locations, incorporated slide-dissolve projection sequences on two 8 ft. diameter weather balloons.  I have also recently done installations involving over 2000 fresh flowers, water and light.  I currently have an large installation entitled “1614-1914:  A Disappearance of Wings” traveling as part of the exhibition Birdspace from the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans to the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, the Hudson River Museum and the Tucson Art Museum among others.