ARTIST STATEMENT

My art explores the concept of absence and presence wheeling in and out in of life. The faces and figures I paint are vectors to unearth feelings archived in memory and traces of people and events blurred by time. My paintings are a palimpsest where I create a new presence.  The impulse to create this body of work came from looking at my grand mother’s  albums of small black and white snapshots telling life stories. It led me to reflect about the rhythm between absence and presence and became the theme of this new body of work in which I use photo references as well as my own live model drawings to paint people in the muted atmosphere of an imagined space.

 

I use oil paint and cold wax in a very tactile process building layers where the images take on the life I give them. It is a constant back and forth of adding and erasing on the surface and redrawing the forms with pencils on and through the paint. The title of this body Legato meaning notes played in one breath  in music mirrors the circle of life.

 

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