I am an artist who works in multiple media but mostly based on the use of paper. I cut paper, draw on paper, print on paper and create artist books out of paper. In the past I also made handmade paper, but now leaves that backbreaking labor to the professionals.
This work incorporates an exploration of positive and negative shapes through the use of a few basic images, including root forms, (See my artist statement concerning Root imagery located in the Print Gallery 2011-2010) and small town streets but mostly focusing on trees, telephone poles and wires. Some of these images are treated as silhouetted figure/ shapes against a ground. In others, the working of the figure and the working of the ground are both given equal measure.
The simplest connection between these images is based on the fact that they are wood (trees and telephone poles). Trees are processed and cut down for other uses. Where once they existed as life sustaining objects in nature, providing food, shelter and fire they are now a means to advance modern life by bringing ever larger structures, electricity and communication to the masses. As changes occur, more timber is being processed and the land that was once farms and forest is developed until it becomes unrecognizable. The notion of trees and farmland being decimated to create the upscale housing developments that, I perceive, are adversely altering the landscape surrounding my home is also another aspect of what I try to investigate in some of my other artwork.
I use wires and tree-silhouetted shapes repeatedly (in paintings, prints and artist books) in an effort to recreate the experience of seeing these shapes framed against the sky. In my daily commute on the highways and country roads at dawn and dusk, I obsessively observe the way tree branches, electrical wires and transformers look silhouetted against the sky. The beauty of the abstract shapes and the subtlety of the values, dark branches against a dark sky, creates an interesting contrast to the stronger images I am aware of when the sky is brilliant blue or leaden gray. To paraphrase the artist Andy Goldsworthy, I want to take something you always see but were blind to and use the images in such a way as to make them beautiful or at very least, noteworthy. I am looking for a specificity of certain trees that catch my attention, the path a branch takes as it grows, the direction and design a tree trunk makes against another, the crossing of wires creating patterns, the grouping of leaf shapes and the resulting negative spaces.
The bristly effects of the telephone poles become our contemporary trees, the wires leading out in all directions like branches. They are the prevailing silhouettes on the horizon. Trees and telephone poles - one has inherent beauty and the other is an eyesore. One denotes the natural world and a reflective mood while the other is a dialogue about the city, and most obviously, communication. One is created from the other. It can be hard to see the allure of the ubiquitous telephone poles and electrical lines that criss-cross all areas of the developed world in place of the trees. Yet looking up at the wires as they string from pole to pole and make their complex connections, they suggest movement and energy.
This work incorporates an exploration of positive and negative shapes through the use of a few basic images, including root forms, (See my artist statement concerning Root imagery located in the Print Gallery 2011-2010) and small town streets but mostly focusing on trees, telephone poles and wires. Some of these images are treated as silhouetted figure/ shapes against a ground. In others, the working of the figure and the working of the ground are both given equal measure.
The simplest connection between these images is based on the fact that they are wood (trees and telephone poles). Trees are processed and cut down for other uses. Where once they existed as life sustaining objects in nature, providing food, shelter and fire they are now a means to advance modern life by bringing ever larger structures, electricity and communication to the masses. As changes occur, more timber is being processed and the land that was once farms and forest is developed until it becomes unrecognizable. The notion of trees and farmland being decimated to create the upscale housing developments that, I perceive, are adversely altering the landscape surrounding my home is also another aspect of what I try to investigate in some of my other artwork.
I use wires and tree-silhouetted shapes repeatedly (in paintings, prints and artist books) in an effort to recreate the experience of seeing these shapes framed against the sky. In my daily commute on the highways and country roads at dawn and dusk, I obsessively observe the way tree branches, electrical wires and transformers look silhouetted against the sky. The beauty of the abstract shapes and the subtlety of the values, dark branches against a dark sky, creates an interesting contrast to the stronger images I am aware of when the sky is brilliant blue or leaden gray. To paraphrase the artist Andy Goldsworthy, I want to take something you always see but were blind to and use the images in such a way as to make them beautiful or at very least, noteworthy. I am looking for a specificity of certain trees that catch my attention, the path a branch takes as it grows, the direction and design a tree trunk makes against another, the crossing of wires creating patterns, the grouping of leaf shapes and the resulting negative spaces.
The bristly effects of the telephone poles become our contemporary trees, the wires leading out in all directions like branches. They are the prevailing silhouettes on the horizon. Trees and telephone poles - one has inherent beauty and the other is an eyesore. One denotes the natural world and a reflective mood while the other is a dialogue about the city, and most obviously, communication. One is created from the other. It can be hard to see the allure of the ubiquitous telephone poles and electrical lines that criss-cross all areas of the developed world in place of the trees. Yet looking up at the wires as they string from pole to pole and make their complex connections, they suggest movement and energy.
