Unplanned Evolution
"I'll play it first and tell you what it is later."
Miles Davis
I love drawing. I attended so many drawing classes between Otis and Chouinard's in Los Angeles that it seems as if I knew every live model by name.
Drawing is so intimate. Hand, brain, direction, shape, dark line, light line, obliterated line,descriptive line, always feeling line, feeling interpretation.
Is drawing always a form of calligraphy?! (Mark Tobey, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock.) Like an interpretive dancer moving through the space that holds it. The invisible partner.
I love oil paint. Much of my work is pure pigment. The smell of oil paint has been in my life for so long I am sure it alters my brain chemistry. In my work you will see the line and the pigment doing their dance or singing their song. People refer to my work as musical & lyrical.
When I start working on a canvas I push it to resolution, while working as long as I can on a body of work, to explore and go with it's developmental changes. Each canvas or drawing becomes like a musical note or a letter of a much larger and ongoing statement that continues to evolve and form it's own unique cellular body .
I find it impossible to rework an older painting. I move on in my process as it is ever expanding and always present. I can not plan where the work will go. There is always a connection and evolution from prior paintings; certain symbols and shapes.
I have been working in a limited color palette for years.- yellow ochre, burnt umber, ultramarine blue, paynes grey, mars black, titanium white. Only recently have I started using more color- a cadmium red red(like the blossoms of the Pemoche tree which grows in the Huastecan rain forest of San Luis Potosi, Mexico), a rather fleshy pink and more blues , greens & pale yellows in oil pastels. With the addition of a more expanded color palette the paintings become afterimage light and colored shadows creating a visual zone or dimension of their own.
I am interested to see how these paintings develop since I am working from my most current drawings.
