Artist's Statement

This is my first stab at an artist's statement. Since the school is closed because of snow today, I've had time to work on a (dual) assignment for two of my classes, Senior Seminar and Writing An Artist's Statement. Feel free to comment with suggestions! I will attach a picture of the series discussed at the bottom. A little bit of additional information: the main series is composed of ten pieces (one pictured below), and there are about five "subsequent" pieces so far.

As a young child, my mother would occupy me by sitting me at the kitchen counter with a coloring book and Crayola crayons (I was adamantly against Rose Art brand). At the time, I was an expert at staying in the lines. Almost two decades later, having turned in my crayons for acrylic paint, I avoid boundaries at all costs.

In the series Ice and its subsequent work, ice is left to melt over beads of paint. The surface of the canvas is carefully prepared both to absorb the media enough to stain, and also to repel the water just enough for it to pool and evaporate. The results are mysterious marks of color that interact with one another spontaneously. Preliminary areas of raw paint are intuitively placed on the canvas, many times following my inclination towards a vertical, linear format. Since the ice is a main contributor to the imagery that evolves, resulting shapes are likely to stray from the initial laying of the paint. The unpredictable nature of the ice denotes unforeseen, inevitable change. I do not manipulate the melting ice, just as I cannot control inevitability in life. This is not to say, “All things happen for a reason;” that quote is dim. Rather, it is to highlight the value of possibility.

As a highly intuitive person, most of my portfolio has a central theme of chance, the Ice series not excluded. Paint is beautiful as a substance alone. My work strives to just let paint be paint and enjoy investigating different approaches to that theme.