Looking, Painting and Liminality

MFA Alumni

Major: Painting

Graduation Year: 2016

Artist Statement:

Balancing perception, feeling, imagination and responsiveness represents a threshold, a place between, or a liminal space. This open and undefined state can lead to immense creativity, or to fear and a retreat to extremism, order and structure. I believe that the act of painting parallels a liminal state. The ongoing, cyclical and emergent process of creative work means that the act of painting is a perpetual state of being in-between.
My current painting process involves a response to what I see and feel in the immediate environment, and a dialogue between painter and the painting. I observe from life, respond, and through multiple image iterations transform a perceptual moment into something previously unseen, mediating between perception, feeling and imagination. The responsive act toward the painting involves applying paint, looking at the painting, reacting, brushing, marking, wiping, scraping and sanding over multiple studio sessions. When no longer looking at the original source that inspires a painting, the act of painting bridges perception, feeling and invention. Responding to the new surfaces created, new layers of paint alter and transform the painting into the realm of the imagined.