This project stemmed from a play between paint and print advertisements and it has grown to encompass collage and video. I began by using catalogs and magazines as my palettes while painting. Eventually I began to notice the interesting interactions and humorous dialogue between the scumbled paint blobs and the advertising imagery on the printed, paper palettes.

I now make a variety of marks on magazine pages, posters, window-sized advertisements, postcards, flyers, television commercials, and billboards. I create lexicons of abstract marks and shapes ñ dots, spots, blobs of varying size and shape, flatly hued planes, planes of mottled color, slashes, meandering lines, stenciled shapes, additive and subtractive marks. This play permeates my work.

The advertising images come first. Advertisements are designed to attract attention. Each effort I make is to subvert the advertising image while still leaving it with some power to garner attention. My marks edit some of the advertising information rendering it less recognizable and thus aligned closer to the abstract gestures of paint. Tilting the advertisement on its side also helps me to undermine the blatancy of the advertising image.

I react formally to the compositions and color schemes used in the representational imagery. These affect my choices of paint color, line, and shape. Sometimes the imagery interacts with the paint giving the impression that an olive green blob of paint is attacking a well-coiffed male mode. Or a yawning little girl sports a hat of bilious, red brush strokes. At other times the printed imagery and the paint seem ignorant of each other and resist a narrative bridge between the two media.

I try to strike what I see as a balance between the overbearing nature of advertising’s representational imagery and the nebulous understatement of abstract marks so that both representation and abstraction can be both forefront and periphery. Where representation and abstraction, foreground and background intersect and hinge themselves interests me.

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