I am a self taught painter and photographer. Many of my paintings and photographs are arrangements of objects, both real and imagined. When I was a child I began collecting things, and by the time I was in my twenties, I was spending weekends perusing flea markets and antique malls looking for small treasures. Simultaneously, from the time I was about eight years old, I developed an interest in arranging and displaying my collections. In hindsight, I realize that my need to collect and arrange were born of the need to both find comfort and create order in a world that felt unwieldy and sometimes out of control. I enjoy the experience of taking everyday objects that might seem boring on their own (old erasers, bread tags, boxes of staples, matches) and creating beautiful, textured visual imagery by clustering those objects together on an imaginary grid, usually by color. My interest in arranging things neatly has been a consistent theme in my work since I began painting, drawing and taking pictures in my thirties. My paintings often elevate mundane, ubiquitous, sometimes obsolete objects into conversation with symbols from nature and the supernatural. I am particularly interested in eliminating complexity and detail in my subject matter, and in stripping things down to their essential forms.
