work

Stripes have been part of my vocabulary for over 15 years. They become a vessel for paint and color. They allow my hands to create rich, voluptuous textures, layering paint without the distraction of shapes and forms.

My striped paintings seem to have a recurrent pattern, yet there is shapelessness, a non-pattern, more like an illusion of repetition. Not one stripe is the same as the other. Similarly to life, where we have days, hours and minutes that create a pattern, yet not a single moment resembles the next.

“The series called “above and below” combines the view from above a landscape, what you would see looking down from an airplane, with the view below, what you see when you are on a walk.  On top is the sky, then there is a middle part that is busy and a foreground that is perhaps not so busy. I wanted to show in color how this landscape feels to me.

In the funnel series, the stripes become very energetic. There is a power, a vortex, a drive that picks them up and swirls them around. Yet there is a focus that holds them grounded. This creates an enormous sense of tension and suspense.

Although I enjoy working with the “shapelessness” of stripes I also love to work on abstract paintings that maintain shapes and forms.  A shape in a painting is like a figure in a landscape. For me the abstract shapes are alive. They have a heart, an area with vibrant color and intense brush strokes, and limbs, shapes that reach away.