Biography
In my paintings and drawings, I piece together historical, fictional and decorative artifacts, not seeking to create a plot line or a pictorial scene, but to create a visual essay. With an academic background in Medieval history and Latin, my work shows scholastic curiosity, highly tinted by the rose colored glasses of too many nineteenth century novels. It has a wistful nostalgia for an old fashioned aestheticism and for the gentility of times gone by. There is a girlish longing for the illusions and delusions of fictional romance in “please be all I want you to be”, a world in which the men are dark and rigid and the ladies soft and fair. If at times self-indulgent, even possibly romantic, the work is balanced by a good dose of irony and humor. In the four panels of “and there are hands carrying out the genteel rituals of love”, courtly gestures are transformed into a sort of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ game with undertones of submission and dominion. Behind the lighthearted play, I am exploring questions of narrative objectivity and of the ambiguity of information in general.
In my present wok, I am using collage to incorporate various elements of visual and textual sources, further emphasizing the actual construction of the idea. Each component retains its narrative importance and are all combined together to create an aesthetic whole. The images themselves are slowly constructed, from light broken lines, repeated, reinforced, and from layers of thin paint built up. The works, however, don’t seem laborious, but light and flat, with quiet careful colors. The rational balance is juxtaposed by the pure pleasure of painting: the improvisational slipperiness of runny paint on smooth surfaces, the meditative repetition of pattern-making, the enjoyment of soft color. Arbitrary pleasure enters the narrative, and serious enquiry is allowed to be decorative. This is, after all, fantasy, and pleasure is allowed to prevail.
