For me, the ideal viewer notices and questions every visual detail, feels the staging of visual forces, remakes the painting in her own imagination. For me, modernist abstraction is a living communication.
The Galapagos series began twelve years ago after I spent some months in South America. In the Galapagos, when you poke your head up through the surface of the ocean the bare horizon and the rock walls of the islands give no indication of the flamboyant carnival of sea life just below the surface. The surface of the ocean is the dividing line between the bare world above and the teeming rainbow world below. As if suspended from the taut line of the surface, color shapes like islands seen from an airplane animate the fields of my paintings conflating perspectives from far above and from below.
When I paint, the experience of the Galapagos joins with memories of the great paintings that I have loved for years and from my experience growing up on a barrier island. In the evolution of each painting, visual ideas and influences appear, set off in a direction only to be redirected by more appearances until the moment when I recognize the arrival of the spirit of the work. The evolution of each painting is unpredictable and I relish the surprise of it.
