Artist Statement
I’m a painter and award-winning writer who’s endlessly fascinated with wordplay and the visual arts. Largely self-taught, I painted in watercolours, oils and acrylics in high school, but set the palette aside for two decades while pursuing a career in print journalism. In the mid-1990s I rediscovered my passion for throwing paint around.
For me, art-making is not merely a process of visual expression but a merging with the divine spark/vibrational energy that is, to me, the creative process. The resulting work is hard to categorize: I paint serene, post-impressionist landscapes and I paint boisterous, abstract-expressionist colour bombs. I paint electric skies and lively, dancing gardens. My urban and inner landscapes are more visceral; I apply paint with a vengeance, using brushes, knives, electric toothbrush, rolling pin … dabbling, flinging, dripping.
Growing up in southern Ontario, I was keenly influenced by nature hikes through the woodlands and marshes of Simcoe County with my father Clifford, a painter and avid birdwatcher. Works by Emily Carr, A.Y. Jackson, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Joan Miro and Mark Rothko make me feel great and small at the same time.
I work mostly in acrylics, and I’ve been told there’s a joyous, unfettered quality to my art; it pleases me to hear that because I never was very good at staying inside the lines.
