"Northern Kites"

"Drawing with Pictures"

For some time now I have been refining a technique where I make images from my photos, drawings, and found materials by cutting them all up into small pieces and then assembling them together into loosely narrative collages.

Because I try many different combinations before I am finished with one image I like to think of this technique as 'drawing with pictures'. I take these various collage elements and use them in the place of marks drawn by a pencil or paint brush. Once I have settled on an image I silk screen print it on canvas and then stretch the canvass to be painted with oil paints.

Stemming from an ongoing habit of keeping journals and sketchbooks over the years I try to carry the recording of personal experiences over into my paintings to offer sometimes very quiet examples of distilled memories and other times stream of consciousness oriented imagery where scale and logic get put aside in the place of sheer perception. I want these pictures to offer a viewer something like a short story that holds them for a moment and transports them, if only for an instant, into another place. That place is often a world of nostalgia for pasts that may have never existed and where rationality serves only as a basic framework.

In the case of my folding panel paintings I am especially interested in exploring the fact that a viewer must walk around the piece and that there is no one single vantage point which is the definitive one. As a viewer circles the object they must spend a bit of time with it and from different viewpoints certain parts disappear, new combinations of elements are superimposed beside each other, and new stories are made as the parts reassemble themselves.