Dogoids and Other Creatures

 

This body of work was inspired by my Sketchbook Journals and the desire to use the same technique but on a larger scale. I believe these animals and man-beasts dwell in the collective unconscious. By tapping into this underground current of images, I make connections to primordial energy that still, if we are open to it, influences our present and can inform our future.

I find that these beasts are lurking in the paint and I just help them to emerge. After making an under-painting of random marks and swipes of paint I put the panel away for a while. Later I come back and turning the panel in every direction, I look, giving myself time to ‘not know’, until, eventually, images start to come out of the chaos. In this way I let the painting tell me what it is about, instead of completely controlling and dictating to it. Intuitively, choosing some forms and negating others, I build a composition that integrates the elements into a whole. 

As I’m painting, the beasts are whispering to me their stories. Not wanting to nail down an absolute narrative, and feeling that the truth often lies in ambiguity and mystery, I am averse to giving explanations or meanings. There are always multiple meanings, so any particular one might dissuade the viewer from discovering their own. Sometimes the insights of those who see my paintings are profound and give me other levels of nuance that I hadn’t even considered. So I love to hear the stories the beasts tell to other viewers.

I had a one-person show of this work in 2002, at the Perrin Gallery in Brookline, Massachusetts.