I am an organic surrealist oil painter. I paint glazes of oil paint, like layering stained glass, and incorporate gold or silver leaf detail. This technique achieves luxuriant colors and luminosity. I bend familiar textures – gleaming metal, wood or grassy ground – into new and not altogether impossible shapes. The naturalism of textures and material are important anchors and relics to draw a relationship to our presence.
The natural and manmade environment are external stimuli for textural and compositional combinations. Yet the essence of my art is based on spontaneous visions of my own mind. I synthesize and transport those themes to a plane apart from our own. The images are still recognizable, but they take on a larger, more resonant meaning in the context of an unfamiliar world.
My organic surrealist paintings suggest a sense of self reflection, and curiosity and wonder about a world unknown yet familiar. The heightened experience of our reality brings awareness of the intense detail and continuously changing surrounding and self. Identity of self, impermanency and transformation are continuous themes in my work. Each painting depicts elements of decay, destruction, and simultaneous growth.
_____________________________________________________________
I was born in northwest Germany and lived in Singapore, Estonia, and England before settling in my present home in Portland, ME.
I have exhibited internationally, including:
England, Hungary, Italy, Germany, and the United States.