“Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
T.S. Elliot, excerpt from “The Four Quartets”
Capturing moments of life has been my focus with my oil painting for about the past 15 years. I begin by carrying a camera with me and photographing people in just about any situation I am in. I then go through all the photos to see what my heart and intuition respond to: maybe it is a person’s gesture, an interaction between people, the play of light on a scene or a person. It could be a mood that is evoked, the way a dog leaps to catch a frisbee or the energy that the action of a horse and its rider is producing. Whatever it is, that becomes the focus of my painting.
These paintings you see differ from my past work in that I am leaving out the environment and focusing solely on the figure—except for the odd prop here and there that provides what seems to be a necessary context. Mostly, though, you are free to make up your own stories about these paintings!
Though I love the land and the natural world, it has been the human being that has fascinated me most as a subject for my work. My art does not have an overtly political bent, but as far as I am concerned, the act of acknowledging the individual and the ordinary stuff of daily life IS political! It is an affirmation that each of us matters, that all of life matters simply because it is. It is an affirmation of the sacredness of being. To me this is the “dance” Elliot refers to in the excerpt above. And “there is only the dance.”