Paintings

I play trumpet as a hobby and I listen to jazz as I work. Even when my studio is silent, jazz is there, inside me. My imagery is jazz made visible: layers of melodies and rhythms, swinging and syncopating, calling and responding. This visual improvisation is conjured from a deep place and appears as gestures, colors, symbols, and glyphs. Shapes, textures, and patterns move through me onto my canvas.

My paintings share the complexity and innovation heard and felt in the Bee Bop innovations of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, saxophonist Charlie Byrd and jazz explorer of 'terra incognita,' Wayne Shorter.

I paint using vibrant colors on highly textured, innovative, shaped canvases. I build these canvases with collaged fabrics, gesso, epoxy, string, and thin plywood. They are ingeniously lightweight and durable. The jigsaw puzzle shapes in my paintings are born from forms I see in nature. They become a metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things in the world. The cutouts create vacant shapes and shadows, counterpoint to the painted shapes. The outer edges jut into space, casting shadows that move as the light of day changes. Arrangements in texture are the foundation for paint. This underlayer builds rhythms and gesture and is the structural underpinning for the spatial relationships I then create in paint.