Artist Statement

I’ve been painting and dancing most of my life. These two practices are the creative life forces that feed my soul. I am a perennial dance student. I love the communal energy, inclusivity, and collective joy that I feel in dance studios and in the nightclub dance scene. My latest painting series is inspired by the music, lights, fashion, movement, and euphoria I experience in dance culture.

Escape and ecstasy. When I dance, I inhabit a cosmic, empowering, euphoric universe. By unleashing this passion into my painting practice I’ve discovered a potent personal synergy. In my Dance Series paintings, I revel in dreamscapes of pulsing, swirling prismatic colors and hypnotic grooves. I explore spatial and rhythmic patterns as vehicles to communicate movement, sensation, energy, and joy.

I get fueled finding visual and sensory parallels between painting and dancing. Regular, random, alternating, and progressive arrangements of shapes communicate varied movements and feelings. Opposing elements such as heavy and light, flowing and staccato, tension and relaxation, expanding and contracting, in control and out of control- all these things I experience on the canvas and on the dance floor. Rhythmic shapes can synchronize or riff off each other. Optical illusions can express psychedelic reverie. Iconography of stars, pinwheels and rainbows can represent nightclub lighting, otherworldly hypnotic grooves, or community inclusivity.

Color is a component I push to express unabashed exuberance. I use pulsating ultra-vivid hues, atmospheric glowing color, black and white dizzying patterns, bright against dull- all to maximize spatial effects and emotions that exude upbeat positive vibrations.

Painting and dancing are ways that I find myself and lose myself…all at the same time.   I hope my paintings spark joy and suggest playfulness, flamboyance, celebration, vivaciousness, and fun.

Biography

I grew up in southern New York state. In 1983 I earned a BFA in Painting from Alfred University, NY and then worked for 10 years as a commercial illustrator near New York City. I moved to Redmond, Washington in 1995 and now reside on Bainbridge Island, WA. I’ve been working as a fine art painter since 2005. I’ve have had several solo shows and my paintings have been included in numerous juried group exhibitions at galleries, art centers and a museum show. I am an arts educator, avid collector of vintage 1960-70s fashion and a life-long student of dance.