My oil paintings originated with how the complexity of living hinders making good decisions. The decisions we make are bedeviled by insufficient, erroneous and irrelevant information and our actions fraught with pitfalls. Much is beyond our control. Others have agendas in conflict with our own. My paintings’ imagery – multivarious, imaginative structures resembling houses and churches set in a psychic space – serves this idea well as it is people who create and inhabit these structures who must navigate the complexities of their daily decisions. The structures are the alphabet of an idiosyncratic language by which I explore the trajectories of people’s complicated lives.
Various ideas about life’s complexity supply the seeds for the paintings. Inept decisions made “on the fly” underlie the “flying” series where structures break apart. Life as a journey led to the “skyship” paintings where structures travel through a mystical space. Flowers’ and life’s transience inspired the “bouquet” paintings.
In recent paintings, my palette is very limited: Grumbacher phthalocyanine blue and titanium white for the psychic space and the structures are painted with Old Holland vleesoker and gele oker licht, Winsor & Newton blue black, and titanium white. This palette is akin to that of Renaissance Dutch painters, my ancestral countrymen.