24” x 18” Oil and Acrylic Wash on Canvas 2022

Artist Statement: For the past several years, I have reexamined my painting practice and my role as an artist in the place in which I live on the west coast of British Columbia. I continue to be interested in uncertainty and play that exists in the space between abstraction and representation. These two concepts dominate the history of painting and you can ride the edge of either one like a wave. I want that slippage of one space to occupy the other. I don’t think painting should be clear as to what you are seeing; there should be a journey, a quest and a reward. If there is something that is essential in my approach to painting, it would be making the process visible, letting the viewer account for the application of paint, see the layers and to experience the work in its entirety. I want the paint to be a contradiction, to both sit on the surface like in modern art to be selfreferential but to also optically blend from a distance suggesting space. It is this push and pull that occurs in the experience of looking that I find compelling. Painting is a much-needed meditation in this world, a pulse check, a human connection to the physical world, a counterpoint to the digital age. How we encounter images, information, and facts on a daily basis is most likely to be digital, which extends the life of a painting but does not substitute for it. Painting reconnects me to world.