Artist Statement

Life is order and chaos.

Finding one’s balance is not often easy but I find that art frequently offers direction.

As a painter, my art could fit into any number of genres. I have chosen Relationalism to describe it. It is a word that emphasizes the essential interconnectedness of the psyche to our environment rather than the modern indulgence with individual isolationism. The historian, Robert Hughes, described the modern bombardment of visual stimulation as “Image Haze,” a value relative assault by excessive visual stimulation, random association, and juxtaposition of visual information.

In Zen Buddhism there is a saying, “When you pick up one piece of dust, the entire world comes with it.”

The past is very much a part of the present.  The individual’s perception of modernity is a complex mixture of worldwide cultural influences derived from television and film entertainment, internet streaming, social media, magazines, radio, the history of visual art, educational institutions and daily life activity.  All must be considered when trying to understand the modern paradigm of value relativism. This paradigm has been called the Post Truth era and it has created an untenable limit on our ability to find cooperative and peaceful ways to relate and live together. What is true-what is false, what is good-what is bad, what is right-what is wrong?

All must be considered to understand the paradigm of Relationalism. And so, my primary concern is to draw attention to this kaleidoscope of excessive visual information and the burden of its conflicting disparate parts; realism verses abstraction verses non-objective design.  In so doing, I try to move my art closer to finding a truer understanding of what it means to be human within the complex visual diversity that dominates our lives.