ARTIST STATEMENT

            Majoring in studio oil painting in the 60’s, I explored pop art, impressionism and expressionism. In graduate school my professors pushed me towards abstract expressionism buy my female figures kept popping out and I began to work in a surrealistic expressionist manner, exploring texture, color and intense emotion through abstract figural work.

            As in Dubuffet’s work and in “outsider” art, which I collect; the accidental, the random, the “scribble” fascinate me.  Dubuffet believed, like the surrealists, that the subconscious mind was the key to art.  When I paint, I go in to a zone and my right brain takes over and my people appear.

            The late Ed Pasche and the Chicago Imagists, Annette Messager, DeKooning and Francis Bacon are great influences.  I agree when Messager says that being an artist means incessantly healing one’s wounds and simultaneously opening them again in the process.   My paintings and prints are automatic, accidental, surreal and dreamlike exploring what it is to be female, human.  I am celebrating our strengths and singing our praise, but also, empathizing with our extreme vulnerability.  My work is about hope and sorrow and despair and joy.  I explore issues of friendship, multi-culturalism, loneliness, vulnerability, strength, beauty, life, decay and disguises.

            Max Ernst, whose frottages I have always admired, says that he looks to a universe of disturbing imagery that lies on the tip of the eye’s and mind’s tongue; and I believe that speaks to my work.  My art lies in the deepest heart, dealing with life, death, age and disease with my color and texture generating feelings of hope, strength and even joy.