I am preoccupied with the act of painting - of applying paint to surface.  Much has been written about the interplay of chaos and control in my work but ultimately, for me, it always comes down to painting.

I work with a single tool - an implement which provides enough facility to create sweeping passages while affording sufficient dexterity to fashion the most exacting detail.  When I paint nothing carries as much weight as the simple gesture of spreading paint on a panel.

I take photographs, which do act as an initial inspiration for my work.  But, in truth, these photos blur into the substrate of my subconscious.  Always informing my work, guiding my composition, but rarely determining specific elements.

Music also directs my work - bringing energy to bear on a piece.  Often I can hear myself keeping time with a percussive beat.  But again, it is only a suggestion, supplanting an idea, as my hand works layers of color and glaze.

A final governance is the visceral and cerebral balance I draw upon from my experiences, travels, and environment coupled with time spent in the studio.  A development that, never has specific direction, but gleans from memories, dreams, and emotions while permeating paint and panel.  Sometimes adding, sometimes removing, but always exploring the simple act of painting.

What does all of this mean?  Simply, that I love to paint.

As a child there are two things that stand in my memory strongly: love of people and love of the natural world. Both are subjects of my own introspection of life and a soul’s spiritual journey. I first started painting even before I started school, so 3 or 4 years of age. It remained a force within me through my careers that demanded to be expressed. I would paint after work in a hot attic of a friend’s house, laying large canvases on the attic floor. I still paint with the canvas laid on the floor or a table. This allows me to puddle the paint and build up layers. I use pencil, latex oil and even house paints to build up my canvases. I use brushes, plastic wedges but also sticks and grass to move the paint. I am self-taught and continue to teach myself new techniques.

My use of color and texture is an invitation to the viewer to spark their own curiosity and cause them to look more deeply in their own self to find their authentic self. Early in my works, I choose to represent faces, albeit abstracted. They often featured red ears. Their expressions capture raw emotion. The style was very loose with much of the image merely suggested by stripes of paint. They are moody and strong.

I evolved into landscapes, informed and inspired in great part, by my love of being in nature. I hike often. These experiences would translate on to my canvases as cactus and roadrunners. My several trips to Big Bend had a transformational effect on me.

Since moving to the mountains of western North Carolina, the natural world with all the gifts she possesses has enveloped me and calmed my psyche. Distanced from the chaotic busy world of cities and airports, I can now focus on the native fauna as subjects. Roadrunners now share my subject matter with woodpeckers. Large canvases make room for bear, deer and elk. Not as they actually appear, but as I interpret them. I especially concentrate on the eyes as they are portals of their life force and innocence. The eyes invite the viewer to reconnect with the natural world that we originate from.

I was raised by my paternal grandmother who was a master seamstress, artist, and self-taught pianist. When I was five, she taught me how to sew. I learned about the magic, mystery and power of thread, bobbins, and beautiful old machines that hummed and made amazing patterns in colored lines that seemed to flow and float across the fabric surface like music coming from an open window.

In her studio there was a wall with hundreds of bobbins wound with a rainbow of colors carefully arranged in a perfect sequence of hues, values, and spectral intensity. She would let me choose a basket full of steel bobbins loaded with colorful silk and cotton thread and place me in front of a massive antique Singer sewing machine. The bobbins would spin, whirl, and lay out the most delicate lines in a gracefully meandering rhythm. It was a powerful, transformative and liberating experience that would help define the course of my life as an artist. I learned a way to create a visual world of infinite patterns, movement, and space that was self-sustainable and my own.

During the Covid 19 pandemic I found myself leaning into these memories for support. The recollections of my grandmother Willie Gore-Smith in her light filled sewing studio surrounded by a courtyard filled with mimosa trees inspired these works. This work is my homage to her remarkable inner strength and the gentle way she nudged and supported me. She guided me into the world of art that she knew and expressed with her bobbins and magic machines.