Artist Statement

For the past 35 years, I have been a painter. Looking at objects and images,I began by representing them in heavy, modelled paint. After moving to Alaska in 1982, I opened a working studio and exhibited my work, depicting the reality of people captured in a moment of time. Studying my heritage through family photographs, I painted again and again the images that predated me, formed me and readied me for the future. Thickly, I laid down opaque shapes of color, solidly locking `my' people onto the canvas.

In 1995, I began work on my MFA at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Painting from life, I looked at the surface of women in male dominated society. I continued to paint heavily, all the while longing for the beauty of my under paintings to remain in my work. Midway through my masters work, I explored the monotype process, which forced me to paint with transparent colors. Immediately, this transparent quality transferred into my work. The process of the painting became readily apparent on the surface, and became as, if not more important than the subject matter of the painting. Areas of the under painting and raw canvas were exposed. The canvas became filled with brilliant drips and washes of transparent and translucent color, along with the opaque solid shapes of color that I had come to rely on.

During the same time, I also began visiting the Shasta Abbey, a Buddhist monastery in northern California. My vision changed. I began looking beyond the surface. Looking inward, a small quiet, empty octagon kept appearing. Moving beyond representionalism, using charcoal and oil bars, I masked off pure white octagons and made marks around them. Focusing on the action of these marks, I simply tried not to draw in deliberate manner. A series of works poured forth: "Making a hole in emptiness."

As my Buddhist practiced deepens, so does my vision. The work continues to transformas the universe reveals its true nature. As I read the Sutras, 'chiliocosms' become the content of my work. Like a galaxy of galaxies, this 'three-thousandfold-great-thousandfold' theory of the structure of the universe makes ultimate sense to me. To truly express myself, this is what I paint. My paintings, drawings, prints and digital images attempt to register the dynamic magnitude of our universe. The universe that is within and at the same time encompassing everything in existence.

I now strive to make 'real art. This art is as close to the Truth as I can possibly get without not making it. In both my figure and Buddhist works, once the marks are laid down, I move on, naturally, able only to record a glimpse of a present moment, now past.