Artist Statement

My art is an interaction with energy. I paint directly from looking at life in cities and on the land. I’ve painted at mountains, at the desert, in gardens and at the sea, and what happens is unpredictable even to me. There is a twilight zone of thought like when people fall asleep, and with my 20 years of painting outdoors, I create images on the canvas between what I am looking at and what drops in from my psyche.

I have traveled to paint on 5 continents, with a working method of taking a full oil painting set-up including a Stanrite easel, Guerilla brand travel paint boxes (with foam core in the slots and cut canvas taped onto each side), oil paint and brushes. I am not a realist painter and I taught myself to do this initially by varying speed between slow and deliberate, to fast and ahead of perception, and switching back and forth until now it is something that overtakes me and does itself. It is from my own learned behavior and practice with my brain.

My studio work is painted with the globally and locally painted outdoor work as the basis. I have 800 of them to work from and will never stop. My work from China looks different than my work from India, and my work from Brazil looks different than my work from the many places in Europe, and my work in the United States looks different than my work in Morocco and Argentina, but it is all recognizably my style. I paint 20 to 40 motifs on a painting trip. They vary and are cohesive at the same time.

I am interested in neurology and how the brain changes with art making and art looking. I knew that from my psychology study before it became fashionable to speak of in science and art. That’s how I knew how to teach myself to do what I do. I am interested in non-local consciousness and how remote viewing works, and am fascinated that no one knows how to define what consciousness is.

My work includes symbols that generate themselves, that have been recognized by people of other cultures when I wasn’t aware of them myself but had painted them. Brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor, of one of the most famous TED talks, wrote me back to agree that indeed some of my art looks neural like what she experienced during her stroke. I will continue thinking of science and art and physics and the mind as I continue creating art. I have writing around these topics that I am developing and can be sampled on my daily Instagram posts.

I studied art at The University of Pennsylvania and The Art Students League of New York, and interior design, filmmaking, and arts administration at New York University. My degree in psychology is from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I volunteered with the Guggenheim museum for one year in their Learning Through Arts program, serving 6th graders in PS 186 in the Bronx.