Artist Statement

In my early training with the Shoudo master in Kyoto, I was exposed to the work of Japanese calligraphers whose art centered on interpreting those characters of the writing system for which they had accumulated a deep personal affinity. The meanings of these characters resonated with their own lives, imbuing the shapes with special significance. Because of my different cultural and linguistic background, I lacked the personal connection to the writing system. Instead, my task as a student of Shoudo was to master the brushwork as a means to focus the ephemeral emotions and experiences of the instant of painting into a bold visual expression of the energy of the moment. On returning to my studio in California, I continued to practice this highly disciplined approach to brushwork, developing some new parameters in place of traditional ones. I began to merge Shoudo techniques with figurative gesture drawing, abstracting the figure as Shoudo abstracts a calligraphic character. This work involved painting many focused single-stroke pieces, from which I selected those that had the greatest integrity of line and coherence as compositions.

During these years of working with the single stroke of brush and ink, I had the feeling there was something left out. I was missing an integral and meaningful part of my own American/European culture. It emerged that while I valued the access to the ephemeral moment facilitated by the calligraphic brushwork, the process dramatically limited each piece’s further development. The termination of the stroke simultaneously marked the end of the process and the end of the brief moment it recorded. Eventually this limitation grew stifling and gave rise to my new challenge: to integrate the single skeletal stroke, the expression of the moment, with color and other elements to create a composition that cohered as a whole, all without diminishing the original energy and focus. Those efforts have been realized in these recent large-scale paintings, which express the immediacy of the moment, further developed with a greater sense of emotional and aesthetic depth.

The first brushstroke—rooted in my earlier expressive brushwork practice—usually becomes the soul of the painting, and directs the course and character of the composition. Thereafter the color and movement of each brushstroke is a response to a previous stroke, improvising like dance partners. (In choreographing a dance, each step gives rise to the subsequent step.) Thus all other elements of the painting—lines, colors, shapes—spring from that initial “soulstroke.” The initiating soulstroke remains a record of the particular ephemeral moment and its emotions, an expression that is responsive to music and the movement impulse of the body.

The current paintings are a visual expression of movement inspired by the music I listen to while working. My musical collection is wide-ranging but when painting I am particularly drawn to R&B, Motown, jazz, and African music. The energy that makes you want to dance and move your feet, the rhythms, melodies, and emotions transmitted by music, all move through the body, evoking a response from arms and brush, to translate the implied movement of the music into expressive brushstrokes on canvas. During the continuing development process, the music plays an important part in determining the painting's direction and feel. The resulting energetic dance of the brush and paint leaves a visual record that defines the personality of the finished work.

At a certain point, the painting acquires agency or identity apart from the music, and from that moment on, it seems to direct its own completion, for as much as the work is tied to music, there is nothing literal or representative about that connection, which is aesthetic and abstract in the extreme. Rather, the music stimulates the flow of authentic movement, encouraging me to relinquish the need to control the outcome, and the loaded brush becomes the translator of the Unconscious. Like all visual artists, my task is to communicate using a non-verbal inner language, to create an expression of the soul conveyed through the body visually, a lasting record of something ephemeral. In the same way that our dreams communicate the voice of the Unconscious to the conscious mind, art of all media can illuminate the intangible unknown, thus giving a deeper awareness of our own nature and the nature of the universe.