Instinct to Dream
oil on hardboard cut to silhouette
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MAP # 70 | 2 Bradley Street -S8, Somerville MA
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Artist's Statement

My work is about sense of place: what it is to be in a place, or to call a place home, to wander streets trying to find lost roots, or make new ones. There's daydreaming, longing, recording and appreciation details.

In my cut-silhouette work, I look at the outlines shapes of the city: utility poles, roof lines, signal lights and so on, shapes so familiar they could almost disappear, but which are the bones of infrastructure. On these forms I work in rich color, painting natural landscapes or atmospheric skies. I work in large scale in oil on cut hardboard, or small scale in watercolor on paperboard. My process starts with my sketchbook practice, where all my work grows. I'll explore the same scenes in pencil, watercolor, relief printing, intaglio, collage, and oil. The changing media giving me shifting vantage points on the same view.

I have such fondness for cities and all the human dramas they stage. I feel a need to draw and create from and within this process. It's my hope that by exploring and expressing the emotive qualities of a certain street corner, roof peak or utility line, the human element of living in the city will stay alive and fresh when planners and developers are marking dashed boundary lines on maps.