Artist Statement

Since 2014, I have used painting to explore the essence of awareness - what it is, how it expresses itself - as well as the feeling of recognition that can be experienced when gazing into the eyes of another.

I have been painting in oils for over 30 years now, and deeply love the beauty and alchemy the medium offers. At the same time, painting and art is so much more for me than just making a beautiful image. When I paint, my mind is stilled and it feels like I open to deeper levels of being. It seems that art naturally reflects the consciousness from which it was made, and I believe that my finished paintings reveal the same stillness I experienced while making them. My hope is that when fully experienced by another, the paintings can be an invitation to open to that stillness.

The stillness that I refer to doesn’t mean that the paintings are gentle. On the contrary, there is usually an intensity to my paintings that can be initially uncomfortable. They aren’t meant to be background images, they are meant to be open us to different experiences of consciousness.

My Meeting Awareness series includes seven large, close-up paintings of faces. The paintings are portraits in one sense, but my main intention with this series was to use portraiture to dive deeply into what it means to meet someone directly, to meet their awareness, reality and being.

Each painting is meant to be an offering of a meditative experience of a direct meeting with an apparent “other”. I found that there is a deep power in meeting someone else's gaze with one's own. For a moment, there can be a sense of timelessness, with no separation created by the mind. This is my intention with these paintings – to evoke deep recognition of stillness and oneness.

With this series, I chose my subjects from my family, friends, and acquaintances, and worked from photographs I take of them. Each painting called for a slightly different approach to the painting process, and each painting I intended to make more “real” than the photograph it was based on. Not more “photorealistic” - photorealism itself doesn’t interest me, and these paintings vary in that regard - but rather, more alive. Because of this, the paintings need to be seen in person, as photographs of the paintings return them to being viewed through a photographic lens. The size of the paintings is also important - because they are large, they take up the viewer’s entire field of vision, which encourages a direct and deeply intimate meeting.

In my Windows and Mirrors series, I wanted to capture awareness in a slightly different way by focusing more directly on eyes. I found that in gazing into each eye, there is the recognition of unity, yet at the same time a different energy or transmission comes through. It seems ineffable and I'm not able to define it in words, but have come as close as I can with the titles of the paintings.

With the symmetrical eyes with flowers, I wanted to take the paintings fully out of the realm of portraiture and become windows into more transcendent realms. At the same time, as painting has helped me discover more and more, these transcendent realms are also a reflection of our own being.