Music is the space between the notes. – Debussy
My work is about the sensual shape of a fig and haikus about persimmons, the integral negative space between it all.
I am interested in flattened shapes and the relationship between shapes, the shape of the space between shapes, the negative space, and the tension of the shapes and the edge of the image. Negative space: the music between the notes, the space between the shapes.
The arch of a madrona branch, the gesture of a line, the found beauty of a ring left by a coffee cup. I like the act of making a mark on paper; the movement of the wrist and arm, the shoulder; of seeing the interaction of a mark in its space; of responding to marks with marks. I am a mark maker.
Although I have lived in the Northwest my entire adult life, I was raised among the grapefruit groves in a small blue-collar town in Southern California. My California roots run deep in the soil of my maternal great great-grandparents’ citrus and avocado groves, and the childhood time I spent on my paternal grandmother’s ranch in what is now Burbank. There, picking fruit, along with collecting duck eggs, was a daily part of life.
I am steeped in kumquat trees, eucalyptus, and dusty oleander, and old adobe and stone houses with a lemon bush outside the backdoor. My childhood was sticky with crimson juice from pomegranates, climbing the plum and apricot trees, and running through the sprinkler to pick grapes. The curve of a peach and the waxy surface of a lemon is iconic of that life. The shapes, the smell, the connotations of citrus evokes memories of my mid-century California childhood.
With the emphasis on shape, my work is abstract in many ways. It has always been representational. I like the simple domestic “everyday” aspect – a bowl of fruit on a table on a patterned tablecloth. Textiles, decoration, and the culinary arts are the vernacular artistic life of women across cultures, and often their only creative outlet. Food and the table, this is women’s work. The music between the notes.