My paintings take landscape and nature as their subject and as a point of departure. I embrace the imperfections and the accidental relationships that evolve among multiple layers of paint and graphic marks. I start with pools of color that blend and disperse into the canvas. These large areas are then layered with collaged printed marks from a vocabulary of hand-made printmaking tools I developed from my impressions of ordinary objects and experiences, such as a pattern formed on a sidewalk from an afternoon shadow, swaying branches or rippling on the surface of a lake.
As I work and allow the brush strokes, pools of color and printed marks to combine, the parts form into an entity that is neither restrained nor governed by an overriding goal or pre-determined resolution. My work is influenced by living in Japan as a small child and experiencing the Japanese tradition of wabi-sabi, which is defined by impermanence, imperfection, visual economy and intimacy. As a painter, I participate in a delicate balancing act between creating something complete and ordered, with leaving just enough imbalance and disorder to allow for movement, rhythm and ambiguous transitions as the painting comes to completion.