Statement
"The artists job is to break fetters & release spirit, to tear to pieces & recreate so forcefully that .... the imagination of the onlooker is awakened and completes within himself the work of art." -- Fred Varley
My abstract work is a journey to create a new wordless vocabulary that expresses profound and overwhelming feelings and sensations.
Spectacular phenomenon and moments of great import challenge all of us to find verbal expression. I am attempting to create a way of expressing the pure power of my feelings at such times. I want to give form and presence to the instance of awe that point when I approach the transcendence that eludes definition.
I want to avoid images because they detract from my efforts to portray the power of my feeling and thoughts; images can carry metaphors and other associations that might confuse my message or sully the pure and fundamental sense of expression I am striving for. Using colour, line and texture to be the only media of communication requires establishing a rapport with my work unencumbered by associations connected with recognizable forms.
I want to strike to the primal and nonverbal part of ourselves; to that elusive place in our souls where words are inadequate and we transcend the everyday and the mundane, where the sense of things greater than ourselves is strongest. I want to establish a mode of communication that will release spirit, recreate forcefully and awaken my onlooker so that he finds some of what moves me alive within the frame of my work.
