Although I am an art director and graphic designer my experience with painting is unrelated to my design work. Rather, it grew out of a dance injury. When I couldn’t dance, I began exploring other modes of creative and physical expression. Painting life, human and animal, replicates some of the kinesthetic awareness and joy of moving my own body.
I moved from New York City to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1991 to be closer to the natural world. I took my first figure-painting class in 1999, working originally in watercolor. Within a year I joined San Francisco artist Tom Mogensen’s art group and switched to oils. This medium introduced me to the transparency, luscious color and sensuous feel I needed for painting flesh. I use the technique of glazing thin layers of paint to capture the vibrancy of breath and movement.
After painting exclusively from the model for several years, I suddenly felt compelled to paint a series of Arctic and Antarctic visions. When I dream about the high latitudes, as I do quite often, I imagine a place bursting with life—whales, seals, wolves, bears. Yet when I came to depict the scenes that so enchanted me, I found myself more interested in capturing something else entirely: a portrait of an austere world inhabited by elusive animals nothing like ourselves.
I don’t see humans and animals as creatures of different orders, but the people I paint are solid; understandable—the animals not so. I paint them merging into the surroundings in which they evolved. Because I am human, I will never be able to do anything but marvel at the mysterious beasts who, unluckily for them, must share this planet with us. For both kinds of painting, I try to capture a little of the dignity I feel priviledged to witness.
