My paintings explore the poetics of seeing. Using body and nature metaphors to illuminate veiled human experience, I have focused on the meanings of inhabiting body and gesture, shape and structure, place and atmosphere. The structures of nature are the structures of the body, are the structures of emotion. My work articulates these visual connections and investigates the relationships, dichotomies and ambiguities between outside and inside, familiar and unfamiliar, beautiful and disturbing, powerful and vulnerable.

Landscape and architectural forms have recurred in my visual vocabulary for many years. Several earlier series of paintings were inspired by different locations I encountered through travel and relocation. These works directly responded to my surroundings as I was consistently drawn to vast melancholy landscapes of sky, desert, and water, and skeletal architectural structures. Attracted to their profound beauty and power, I have long had an interest in environments as materialization of human emotional states.

As personal injuries forever changed my awareness of and relationship to my own body, it became important to image damaged anatomy. A long running theme in my work has been a dual exploration of an anatomical autobiography and a variety of animal images. These paintings investigate the contrasts and ambiguities between movement, flight and freedom on the one hand, and constriction, vulnerability and pain on the other. I use both human anatomy and birds, deer and dogs to dramatize interruption of natural movement, focusing on the contrast between an acute sense of immobility and powerlessness and a forceful sense of grace and self-possession.

In the Wizard of Oz series I experimented with a familiar popular text, exploring many layers of meaning imbedded in childhood memory and consciousness. This tale of a risky journey to a wondrous place filled with damaged characters, provided me with metaphor and framework for my continuing concerns. With these paintings I recast the Wizard of Oz as my own meditation on life, synthesizing much of my previous imagery to form a coherent personal narrative.

My most recent works were initially inspired by the arresting sight of many large trees marooned in a flooded river bank, their limbs reaching up and out, like ours, tangled branches spreading like our own bronchial tree, sustained by a root sytem analogous to veins and arteries. These paintings are about breathing, anatomy and nature — their implications, connections and meanings. On one level I am exploring the essential physicality of the heart, lungs, breath, water and trees, repetitions of patterns and structures in the body and the environment. On another level a metaphor unfolds, speaking of pain, loss and regeneration. Internal organs, keenly felt deep and unseen within the body, serve both literally and figuratively as signals for strong emotions. In the relationship between interior and exterior, water becomes the unconscious body, both drowning and nourishing —reflective on the surface, much hidden beneath, inside. Personally and collectively, living requires struggling for breath and standing on shifting, uncertain ground.