Visual Jazz Painting Process Described In Depth…

I paint on unique, highly textured, shaped canvases. The process I use to build these canvases uses collaged fabrics, epoxy and thin plywood. I employ a high level of craft resulting in technically sophisticated, lightweight and durable canvases. While creating my them I use the sculptor’s reductive technique to shape and remove material.  I create a balance between solid painted area and the ‘holes’. My improvisational jazz painting process builds a visual metaphor for my life through shape, rhythm, texture and content.

Color: I have been drawn to brilliant color since childhood. My color sense is drawn from Nature’s visual expression of life and creative energy.

Texture: This element is the foundation for building space and gesture in the paintings. Beneath the emphatic layering of paint exists a layering of fabric and string. These sub-layers create the structural underpinnings for the spatial relationships and implied movement that later informs my application of paint.

Cutout Shapes: Holes are cut strategically from the canvases to create empty shapes, playing counterpoint to the painted shapes. They affect rhythm and pace. The cutouts become passageways and areas to pause.

Jigsaw Puzzle Shapes: Parallel to our complex improvised lives, the jigsaw puzzle shapes stand as a challenge to linear thinking. These shapes point to the interconnectedness of all things in the world and to the unexpected forms those connections inhabit. 

Note in this example, (Matador) the language of shapes, rhthyms, cutouts, and the compelling jigsaw shape with cast shadows

 Cast Shadows: The jigsaw edges jut into the viewer’s space. These jutting surfaces cast shadows that move as the light of day changes. The edge shadows project outward and the cutouts create shadowy pools, mutually activating the viewing space. 

Human Theme: The gestural qualities suggest life, human action, and personify human activity. The figurative shapes combine into personal archetypal images. The symbols that I create evince transformation and personal growth. My choice of brilliant colors trumpets transcendence and creative energy. The paintings are meant to be uplifting and energizing. According to Carl Jung, the collective unconscious consists of mythological motifs or primordial images. These potentials for creation are seen when they enter consciousness as images. My canvases reveal constellations of these archetypal images. Because they are instinctual, archetypes are closely linked to our bodies. These patterns structure our imaginations and make us distinctly human. They are rooted in the Unconscious just as a tree is rooted in the ground. Jung believed that archetypes shape matter as we see it in nature and that these same archetypes shape our minds as well. The colors, shapes, and patterns express my connection to this “Universal Unconscious.”

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