I don’t know how or where to begin, and I am not sure I want to. I agree with Matisse who said. “He who wants to dedicate himself to painting should start by cutting out his tongue.” I do not believe that what I think and what I feel in my painting can be translated fully from paint to words. So I’ll think of this as a painting and just leap in. I like painters who like paint. I love to paint.
My painting is working within tensions of paradox, ambiguity, duality and contradiction. It is not on one side or the other, it is those polarities united. This is the totality and the fullness. The meaning cannot be expressed in words alone: it is a feeling, a sense, an experience, a joy, an idea.
Process is important – the act of painting itself. Thinking but not thinking, loose and free but controlled. Actively moving. Dance was very important to me when I was growing up. And now the relationship of music and dance is present in the gesture of painting. Creating a dialogue between the paintings, sometimes chaotic, sometimes flowing. It is not static. It cannot be easily read.
The cactus is one of the roughest and rawest plants and it grows the most beautifully gentle, delicate flower. “Latwahn” is an Indian word that means both love and pain. The meanings cannot be separated.
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