I am a shapeshifter who works in paint. I shift the way people view reality.

I awaken interior memories about the earth and expose buried mystical longings.

I work with the myths of the Western world to uncover the psychic roots of our culture

 

I have been painting the earth as it reveals its inner core. As water washes over the land, and eruptions crack the earth open, what once seemed stable and unchanging is drastically altered. The transformation of the earth is a mirror for the transfiguration and flow of all life.

 

As I paint the constant shifts in the earth, I have relied upon inner vision. I picture the rock and earth in my mind in the same manner as I picture bones and muscle lying beneath flesh when I paint portraits. I find that I am always drawn to painting what lies beneath the surface, much as I had been drawn to anthropology as an explanation of unseen cultural structures.

 

About 13 years ago I began to cut the paintings and stitch them back together. Initially they were tentative cuts, so that the tears barely showed. Then I grew bolder and cut more fiercely, although I found the act of cutting the canvas painful-a marring of a perfect whole.

 

The world isn't whole. The once stable structures of government, religion and economics have fissures that widen each day. The very fabric of our life seems to have a false front poised over it. Slashing the canvas deeper seems to expose what we choose to ignore; our dependence upon the earth and the interdependence of all life.

 

We are bathed in light, flooded with water, swirled by the wind. As modern beings we forget our relation to the elements until the electricity goes, the phone is dead, the planes are grounded.

 

Paint is a way for me to express both the seen and the unseen. It bridges the path between our world that we acknowledge, and the hidden world that we just glimpse in our dreams. I paint the force of the earth.