My painting process has evolved into one of non-objective mark-making in which I intuitively react, creating a balanced organization. I then move into collecting, adding and layering. As the layers develop and build, the static of working in a complex texture of paint and materials finally evolves into a compositional equilibrium.
I notice that when I go out, I come home with things that I find, or I somehow spend hours caught up rediscovering these collections of clutter; a dirty feather, a crinkled note from third grade, a pale ribbon, this movie stub, my grandmother's old stamps, and tea stained lace, a nightgown with little pink and purple hearts, or a scrap he scribbled on.
This tendency is hard to curb. I'll take pictures, write notes and make lists, or photocopy an image that catches my eye. I will gather objects that seem like pieces of a story, or little relics. They pile up. I exist in these letters, notes to myself, heaps, and organized clutter. They live in my purses, my studio, under my bed, and in my journal.
They are lumped on the floor when I clean, in a heaving, breathing body of crinkled paper; an OCD kind of thing. I am constantly taking down and moving around these collections on the walls or on the floor to create compositional problems to solve.
Similarly organized, my paintings contain a strategic fitting of drips and brushstrokes, stacked intricately on or next to another, and through each other. I leave a tiny remnant or transparency of certain parts of the piece, and let others sit heavy on top of the surface, resulting in a completed puzzle of selective clutter.
I let my work evolve at its own speed. It can't be forced. Sometimes, a painting needs to sit for three years, and one day I'll wake up, and know how to finish it. The thing about creating is that you have a proof. You have some proof, everyday, that something has been accomplished, that something happened, and that something is different. The mail came, I creased a post-it, I bruised my hip, poured white all over a canvas, left a footprint, or didn't make my bed. I realize that I'm very attached to needing proof of something, evidence that there has been a change. I need to look back, and organize it, make sense of it. I need to leave all this when I die, so someone can find it all and truly know the complexity of one person's life. This is a mark of my existence in this world.
Compositionally, I try to create a tension derived by combining formal opposites; stillness and speed, flatness and illusional space, outline and color; the interplay of positive and negative space, the alteration of light and dark and the countless layers that are built up from a foundation. The moments that foster and retard movement are played out against one another and are often points of purposeful contradiction; a dark, dirty color scheme plays against or flows into one that is glaring or delicate, planes of color which all follow across the space, adding considerable depth.
My work not only attempts to explore the movement of the brushstroke, size, and mark but also the movement behind this- the movement of deciding; making decisions by creating compositional awareness and comprehending the picture space as a space of action. In this reflected motion, my physical presence is emphasized and transmitted to the viewer and alludes to such things as the record of an event, or the residue of experience. Through a process which balances intention with chance, I have explored what gets left behind and those associations with loss, death, memory and layering. The subtle ways in which the unnoticed can permeate and take root in the conscious is what drives my investigations of seemingly transient images and their staying power; a commentary on memory and how time fades its clarity, but cannot fully erase it.
Similar to the process of conjuring of memory, the complex layers of the paint are built like, in Bourgeois's words, "a form of architecture." They are microcosms filled with color, and detail which hold in their depths, a wealth of connotations; an amber haze of transparency just underneath the skin, glittering stitches, asleep and bruised, plastic red cherry cough drops, a neon, electric, cerulean radiation (like blue vanilla slush), and smoky greens, from weathered sea glass, and the hookah, there are body parts resting, and harsh fluorescent streetlights flickering on and off under grey storm clouds, a fire, gushy bleeding hearts, in skeins of muscle and tissue which drip and drain off the bottom edge, next to scraps of letters, numbered, lined, ledgers, and crocheted doilies, that pastel flower wallpaper, illuminated and glowing, behind a womb of moody prayers, whispering back at you.
