Maine’s natural features never cease to amaze and mesmerize me…the dancing shapes the negative space between tree branches and leaves make, the millions of stems of grasses and weeds bunching together like fistfuls of wild bouquets, the wavy horizon of the tops of oaks, pines, and maples, jutting into the sky. The color is rapturous. It is spellbinding and suddenly becomes more than awe-inspiring landscape; I see music and language in it, as if nature is writing a song or telling a story in an ancient language.

     I connect sound with the shapes I see in the organic, lyrical elements that weave in and out of the land. Words appear in rune-like shadows. I see cursive sentences in the tangled brush. The association between musical and written language with landscape is strongly instinctual. My imagination runs wild alongside the gentle breeze, looping in and out of all those mysterious patterns of life and I assume the role of starstruck witness. With each piece, I attempt to weave my sensory experience with the landscape I am reading, finding spiritual satisfaction in the translation. 

 

Process

 

     My process is very much a full sensory experience. I paint with acrylic ink and gouache, draw in lightfast color pencil and pigment-based marker. Some work is all paint and other work is in mixed media. I listen to music as I work, reacting to the sounds with my hand, letting it inform my work. The use of mixed media lends a push-pull quality to the space in the composition and the materials activate each other on the paper with their differences in visual texture and levels of opaqueness and transparency, important in my effort to describe the depth of visual space and balance. 

 

     I mostly use photographs I have taken of my land to inspire my work, though if I happen upon any image that energizes my imagination, I will happily use that, too. The negative space in what I see is just as important as the positive space, and weaving color, movement, space, tension, and shape together feels like I am writing a song or a poem with visual information.