Paper Paintings I & II
2014- 2018

These are my first paper paintings. I hadn’t known I was going to make them. Didn’t, in fact, recognize that I was making them until the work was well underway. Once the first nine pieces were finished, I saw that the process had taken me from painting with paint and brushes to painting with torn pieces of paper—color and line already present—an inert medium reassembled into imagery that conjured the intangible.

Prior to 2014, I made oil paintings on canvas, wood boxes. or wood panels. Recognizable imagery was part of my visual vocabulary, although the work wasn’t in any sense literal. Color and line were notable components, but it was always the process that mattered most to me, the balancing act where elements of drawing and space hang together just so.

In the early months of 2014, in the aftermath of two challenging years, for the first time in memory I couldn’t paint. In the studio, I stood before prepared canvasses or sheets of beautiful white paper and nothing happened. In the absence of clarity about making any sort of art at all, I decided to begin with no ideas or expectations and see what, if anything, developed. Over many weeks, I learned to love the not-knowing, so much so that I almost regretted the sense of direction that gradually emerged. I found myself on the floor with years’ worth of studio relics—old drawings and lithographs, wildly disparate photographs, pages from calendars, and handwritten notes to myself—and started building paper images in an empty hand-bound book. I made collages.

Following an always-regenerative trip to Italy in the spring, I came home and made dozens of small paintings on paper of Florence’s Santa Trinita bridge—a powerful metaphor for the work that was about to unfold, from the passage between what had preceded that point in my work and what was to follow. My friend, the poet Mary Azrael, saw the nascent work and titled it Spirit/Bridge/Torn.

By the end of 2015, the nine works comprising Paper Paintings I were complete. Initially the content was partially literal, a narrative about where I’d been. But ultimately, I am more interested in where I haven’t been, what I haven’t seen, what I can find out about next. Instead of staying with imagery that referenced the human experience of the visual world, I explored the idea that the fragmentary elements we perceive are actually all of a piece, part of universal forces that drive us whether we recognize them or not. The content shifted, the work took on a clarity that surprised me, especially considering its small format, and when the last page of the hand-bound book was filled, I moved on to 7 x 7 inch paper squares. As extraneous content was weeded out, so were the visible sign of assemblage. I stopped thinking of the work as collage because, in fact, I had stumbled back into painting. Applying paint with brushes had morphed into tearing paper with my hands.