When I was a child, my father would toss me wood scraps as he worked on custom projects in our garage. I understood these scraps had value and we would concentrate without talking while we built things. I took my first art class at age eighteen. Looking back, it appears I needed to make a society of images capable of revelation and restoration. Southern culture was a word culture. Language had been corrupted by rote tradition, abuse of power and greed. Can our stories and games be trusted? My paintings provide an antidote to the primacy of words in translating experience. They explore paradox and meaning embedded in visual forms which contrast with one another. I use abstraction and figuration along with traditional art materials and castoff leftovers. I use transparency and opacity, curved lines and straight ones, control and freedom, simplicity and complexity, along with color and the visual neutrality of a gallery space to realize a material world rooted in both nature and mind. It turns out language can be tested by an expanded visual world. And words, once drained of weight and meaning, can be made whole.

“The sources of the fresh reside in the past, twisted and misunderstood." Dave Hickey

Magnolia, the Lotus of Trees:
“Observing leaves: at first, I doubt they are persimmon—
Looking at the blossoms, I doubt they are lotus
How fortunate there are no fixed forms
This tree has no comparison”— Hyesim, 12th C Zen Poet, Korea