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In 1992, I chose to put aside further formal art training in order to pursue my other great love, music. I played locally and nationally, releasing several albums, some on my own Skinny Chest label, founded in 1995 as an art/literary/music journal. In my work, there is always an attempt to draw as direct a connection as possible between the internal world and the natural environment. This is done through an intentionally limited vocabulary of lines, circles, ellipses, etc., which seem to suggest the various stages of convergence and divergence, in natural relationships and cycles. Memory plays a part in these cycles and in its randomness, can suggest many strange and curious connections. I have been conscious of making a space for this in my work. Miniature scenes and objects float amid the larger composition, breaking it up and triggering further associations. The work is meant to be simultaneously vast and intimate, macroscopic and microscopic: imaginary flowers; blooms wrested from dreams; ancient fears (how do you draw these?); floating utensils and other implements; not to mention a good measure of nonsense. In work such as Fresh Everything, Blood Caps and Green Stations, I explored the idea of alternate vocabularies: how to speak of the landscape without drawing the trees; how to evoke the soil without painting the mountains; how to say something personal without confessing anything; how to demonstrate wholeness, interconnectedness, without preaching or being dogmatic. These are problems that I continue to face when making pictures. In the skull paintings of late (Winter Messenger and Summer Receiver), Iíve been returning to a more representational style. A means of capturing the vividness of a waking dream. I find it unnerving that our skulls can be so close at hand, so evident under our skins and yet so otherworldly. The ethereality of skulls is belied by their (awful) commonness.
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