verb. 1.a. To make a shallow cut or mark with something sharp.
adj. Done by chance.

None of my work is formally visualized at the outset. The paintings work outward from the surface in layers that I change with each mark, unclear as to intent, until the last mark is made. I sometimes feel that I am blindly making gestures with color, intuitively creating order out of a kind of chaos. When all the elements within my work make a kind of order, the piece is finished. It is easier to describe a finished piece than the process of finishing it. When I find that the drawing or painting involves an interesting complex structure of dominant and subordinate elements, (i.e., relationships of marks to marks, color to color, activity to static shape) then it is considered complete.

If one were to unearth the layers in my work one would find many different paintings, only parts of which are revealed in the top layer. Some works are added to, erased, sewn on top of, painted over, scraped off, before the final “state” is achieved. Each painting is a separate evolution of the editing and re-editing of these various states.The pieces either develop self-referentially, or grow out of visual experience. For example, “Night Thorns and Fireflies” is inspired on a visual level by cactus and fireflies. Thorns and light are two kinds of visual marks that I respond to, in terms of formal visual vocabulary. Personal symbolic significance is also attached to these “marks”. My interest was not to imitate nature, but to abstract certain characteristics and refer to these while developing my own statement.Experiences serve as information to nibble on, and sometimes feast on, in the creation of an image from the blank paper. The first thing that I do while working is to cover the paper with color. Rarely do I use the same colors or apply them in the same way in the beginning of the works. As a work is developed, applying layers of paint, paper, pastels, thread, or using other mark-making implements, I recall various experiences. These are often visual, yet not exclusively. Other sensory stimuli include music, food (color, texture, spice) and even include my empathetic response to squirming maggots I once watched a fisherman use for bait. These memories, sometimes supplemented by photographs, become the references from which the work is abstracted. From this warehouse of images I extract and evolve new images and relationships.

This was my first statement, written in 1980. The words are relevant again in my work. I am pushing different boundaries, layering in different ways, responding to different tunes, for many of the same reasons.