Perhaps my first mark was in sand or pudding or dark dirt, but as Barnett Newman stated, “ the first man was an artist.”  In attempting to analyze this primacy, I focused on the child and the implicit ego of the childlike state. Childhood possesses the innocence that comes with being new to this earth; babies drool with wonderment, take in the world with a wide-eyed exuberance, and bask in their incapacity to communicate intelligently with others or relay sensory explorations. The dialogue begins with this primal need to communicate; crayons and paint allow even a baby to have agency for sophisticated communication because the sublime can be imparted through even the artless, guileless expressions of a child.Mark making, color delight, and the tactile push and pull of paint or pudding, mud or manure all serve as the vehicles of making portals appear between humans.  My art has focused on both collage and painting. Collage is the physicality of sensory experience. It is  destruction as much as it is curiosity.  The concrete is made abstract, and the myriad print sources and iconic ephemera are rendered up, through scissors and ripping, into a new coded narrative.  The deconstruction of imagery in collage is countered in my paintings by the birthing of an image from the same invitation as a Rothko.   To paint is to address the void that is a blank surface; that first mark is the child, the newborn, unable to contextualize itself without boldly trudging forward, but trudge it does upon the totter of ego and egoless experimentation.

As a painter, I take on the responsibility of a parent, the creator of an image that will eventually free itself from just mark making – it will create narration, elaboration and communication. The story begins.  Art becomes my big baby.  The connection  in meaning between images, words, and objects is integral in both the development of children and of artists.  Watching the birth of post-modernism’s squirming first years revealed that the edges of modern man’s frame are fuzzy, but unlike Rothko’s mammoth portals of the human  dilemma uttering cries against the pain of death and birth, there are new artists exploring those same cave walls from that same first artist. Where does painting go after black squares and Brillo Boxes when anyone with Windows 7 can use MS Paint with no consequences? My work addresses this oscillation between memory and the pleasure of the physical mark. I birth, I parent, but ultimately, the painting will communicate what it wants through the primal grunts of a newborn. Painting becomes a way to provide an internal map for accessing the imagery or, as Trenton Doyle Hancock stated, the art became “generous to the viewer.”

The act of painting has bled into the way I see nature, the way I watch television, the way I absorb news, and the way I interact with people. Painting involves staring, abstracting, blocking out, and embellishing.  To paint is to open the doors of communication to a more complicated human dialogue.