Artist’s Statement
Recent few years of my artistic journey have been earmarked—perhaps even tattered—by an exhaustion and weariness of having to represent on canvas. I have dearly wanted to paint through my own substrate, unburdened by the teleology of objects and phenomena. Through iterations of intentional destruction and modification of images that emerge in my creative process, I gradually came to understand certain habits or symbols that appear in my practice.
These artifacts seemed to manifest across numerous things, such as the movement of the brush, preferred color combinations, proportions on canvas, and contrasts. There was a sense of arrangement to it, like a pattern, perhaps the kind seen in a plant's organic form, or in an arrangement of flowers. Could this be some sort of familial influence from my mother, who has worked as a florist for over four decades? Or is it the thousands of days of impressions ingrained since my childhood with flower arrangements at her flower shop?
Whichever or whatever these artifacts were, I set out to revisit the landscapes featuring plants that I had drawn only sporadically before.
Painting plants came with the relative freedom to deform and distort; and it did the same to my physical movement. Painting became an odd dance of gestures and strokes. The longer I worked on a painting, the more laden the canvas became with depth and ambiguity. Chance often added more meaningful layers and materiality as I repeated the process of application and subtraction until I achieved what resonated with my heart.
Expressions emerging spontaneously out of my foggy mind were particularly good, as they pushed beyond what was predictable and departed the ordinary. This step toward the inscrutable required a lot of courage and a willingness to start over if things went awry. I am still striving to find balance through iterations of addition and subtraction, with an ongoing experiment with my distinctive painting style.
