My suburban community is an inspiration for many of my paintings. They portray quaint mid-century homes swallowed up by neon color fields. I love to capture the quiet strangeness occuring right on a neighbor's front lawn. The painting, Fireflies, along with my participation in an artist residency in Montana, were catalysts for the Cosmos series . My painting style is a type of magical realism where the space is flat with an idiosyncratic perspective.
The Cosmos series are narratives that each reveals a sense of hope within a subtlety, dark situation. For example, a dark, rocky planet has an electronic rainbow inside, animal clouds try to brighten up dark spots on the sun, the black pelican pupil is still alive from the Gulf oil spill, and the planets align to counteract anxiety. Each of these paintings, for me, are like musical notes where I can arrange each image into a grander composition revealing many layers of meanings.
The Cosmos paintings utilize graphic, sci-fi images of geology, outer space, and the ocean floor to describe human vulnerability and spiritual redemption. I am interested in issues of global warming and the recovery process of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, the Tsunamis in Indonesia, and the more recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. I am amazed how the human spirit can triumph over devastating situations. This strength can also be witnessed in everyday life trials and tribulations. I want to visually depict this mystical energy in my work. I inject humorous, joyful, and subversive imagery into my paintings to provide relief from a solemn premise.
