”Just Paint”

Color, movement, rhythm, even melody, combine for me to create image. My youthful love of dance, the effect of one color juxtaposed to another, the mood of melody, created a need in me to express myself with paint. My mind moves my eye to my arm to my hand to the canvas. That’s it; except when I get stuck and then I have to remember two words, “just paint.”

I’ve been called an abstract expressionist, which through labeling alone has put me in association with that memorable and incredible group of artists of the 1950’s called the New York School. People like Willem de Kooning originally from Holland, his wife Elaine, Jackson Pollock, Phillip Guston, Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler. All different, but the thread that runs through their works is easily recognizable to the curious eye. Painters like Kandinsky, Gorky, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns. Painters from all over the world for whom the elemental aspects of art were about form, movement and color. Imagery that could be made with “eyes wide shut” not because the image is absent, but rather transformed with varying degrees of abstraction.

Color moves me. I dream and think in color. I control the impulse to change my hair color every day. Even the absence of color (as they say) black against white is for me colorful. My work is seldom flat, but when it is, it is for its own sake challenging me anew with composition.