About the Drawings
During the summer of 1995, I began experimenting with color pencil and mixed media (graphite, tinsel, sparkles, acrylic on paper) to do still life drawings. The still life objects are from my home and studio environment. These items have become personally symbolic because of the act of drawing them over and over. Sometimes they are given to me by friends who want to see their objects in the drawings.

When I draw, as when I am painting, I study plastic spaces. Often, I draw on separate sheets of shaped paper while working on larger drawings, and then merge seemingly disparate images, making drawing improvisations. Improvisational compositions reveal structures of space and color, and shapes and planes that continually shift.

The drawings listed on this site paved the way for a five-color lithographic print, Origami Kitchen. A limit of five color choices for this print forced me to focus on geometric space, and origami design patterns. This printed image can be folded and incorporated as an origami construction, or viewed flat.

About the Paintings
The process of doing these paintings has helped me study relationships between the physicality of paint, wood and canvas constructions, and color structures. Each painting represents a massive and substantial permanence that is both solid and diaphanous. Surfaces appear to crumble within long passages of time.

In 1991, I began looking for ways to deconstruct prior figural and mythological representation of angels. Some of the paintings incorporate various cultural mythologies of angels. Other pieces represent larger-than-life universal personalities (Macbeth, Lady Macbeth). Architectural gems and fragments of shapes in landscapes and city structures inspire these constructions.

Using paint to define spiritual realities, I portray contradictions: angels of transcendence and earthiness. Angels and human personalities are seductive, luminous, pure, and complex. These figures fulfill a strategy of displacement ­ that of dislodging preconceptions and traditions. The idea of "angel" represents for me a being of intense power, movement, and action. They are entities that are loaded with many colors and energy.

The potent and personal symbolism of these paintings serves as an agent of ever shifting change, making invisible realities concrete. I am trying to create, in many cases, a non-static environment of movement with spaces that speak of contradictions, fire, robust energy, and self-containment.

New Paintings
Mars Angel, Earth Angel, and Morning Angel require that I spend time gathering information about all of the planets within our solar system. I am looking forward to dedicating paintings to the angels that are assigned to guard the planets (according to some sources in angeology), and celebrating the beauty and mysteries of each planet.

The Miles Davis paintings are urgent in their insistence on grit and energy. They will become part of a series of paintings that describe another abstract creative medium - musical sounds and compositions.