Bio

Liquified

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I’ve always felt at home in water as if I was more at ease swimming in water then walking on land. In the early 2000s, several factors converged that focused my perspective about the potential of water as a subject.  The first was my exposure to the black wave paintings of Karen Gunderson, the perpetual movement changed my view of painting water.   Second, was my posing for photographer Janice Rubin for her series, “The Mikvah Project” where women in life transition, emersed themselves in ritual water. The process of being photographed by Rubin inspired my intimate appreciation for the power of water.

But my obsession with water wasn’t fully formed until 2005 when teaching high school art students at St. Agnes Academy (an all-girls Dominican parochial school) in Houston about the figure in motion and, more specifically, about how to capture foreshortening.  Across the parking lot from the all-girls school was the all-male school Strake Jesuit College Preparatory. They had a swimming pool.  I was a known entity at Strake since I had curated their collection of artworks around the campus for three years.  When I asked if I could take my students underwater in their pool to photograph bodies in motion, they were all in.

The effects of the water and affordable underwater-cameras, provided images of a stunning distortion of the body fragmented into ripples of color combining the narrative realism of a figure study with the abstraction inherent in the refraction of light. This experience sparked an “aha moment” for me as I wondered what I could capture with a more sophisticated camera and with professional models who could take specific direction under water.  

I soon began to experiment with different degrees of cropping the source photos and began transferring images to canvas using a grid.  My first layers were in acrylic so that I could quickly establish values and chromatic palettes.  On top of the first layer, I created another layer of oil to enhance the complexity of the abstraction and the realism sandwiched together in one composition.