Please tell us a little about yourself. How did you get your start as an artist?

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t making things. It has always been my natural inclination to communicate visually. I knew at a young age that I wanted to go to art school. I was lucky enough to finagle an enormous amount of time in art rooms throughout my school years. Classrooms felt claustrophobic, and the art room was the only place I felt I could thrive. I worked hard and received a scholarship to Maine College of Art and then attended Bard College.

Once out of school, I glued myself to a studio practice. I was painting from life and then the work organically shifted towards abstraction. Twenty-five years later, I have a solid yet ever evolving visual language that always offers me something new to think about.

Can you speak to the roles of addition and subtraction in your work? What about intuition?

There are several ways in which I begin a painting. One way is to activate the white canvas with an array of marks, lines, and areas of disparate colors. I work with oil paint and R&F Pigment Sticks®. The drying time differs depending on the pigment and application, which allows me to work in layers and sometimes wet on wet. This process lends itself to seeking and finding. I can pull back layers and uncover hidden lines or the ghost of a form.

Pigment Sticks® are a great drawing tool and mix seamlessly with my paint. I often go over sections with Neutral White, which creates infinite variations of off-whites and can also pull marks into a beautiful blur.

My paintings begin in a chaotic way, then I begin to organize that chaos through a series of subtractions and additions. This conscious and unconscious decision-making process becomes more refined as the painting develops. Shapes come and go, make friends, and enemies, and form relationships.

I would define my intuition as an intimate knowledge about the behavior of my materials combined with the willingness to respond to the unexpected as the painting unfolds. A kind of deep listening, deep looking, that allows the painting to be an equal participant in its own making.

Click here to read the full interview on R&F Paints.