Artist Statement // Whenever, Wherever (2023)

My paintings are made predominantly with pastels. They begin as charcoal rubbings that I go over with a watercolor wash, generating visual movements and subtle optical mixtures. I follow the traces that both ground and material have left behind, using dry pastels to tease out forms and rhythms until I arrive at a sense of balance. It is a visual balance – its colors, forms and compositions that give that space its structure. Yet, it is also not just that, as Rebecca Purdum once said, “What it looks like is just one small part of a much greater purpose.” When I am painting, these tangible things that I would so reflexively exploit become something else that floats between wanting to clarify what its material space holds, and knowing that such a thing is elusive and ephemeral, much like the powdered pigments that gives these paintings shape. 

  
Like Julie Methru, I am thinking of literal and abstracted space, and the emotional tonalities that we associate with such places and the events that pass through them. As it is in _Chendana_ and _A Lament_ that were named for their origins, I think of the lives of Georgette Chen and Giotto and the work they have left behind – memories in and of themselves of times long lost. Be they drawings of things, or a material impression, an emotional history is embedded into their visual presentation like a memory. And, like a memory shared that grows with each re-telling, it becomes more of an enduring idea than a past remembered, though we think of them as such all the same. 

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A Lament