My project-based work is focused on place and the environment in the broadest sense, approaching landscape with a variety of concepts and mediums. Making art is for me a connection, a means of making sense of my personal experience within an art historical perspective.
The latest series Blink and Creations, painted on canvas, were first inspired by Tintoretto’s The Creation of the Animals. Initially I looked to Tintoretto paintings thinking about drama, light and shadow. I found this painting mesmerizing with its frenetic energy, wild expression and color. The Creation paintings are abstracted, alluding to forms of objects and animals, while the Blink paintings use stills of wildlife from an outdoor camera as their source.
Paintings on panels and works on paper in Almost New and Arrivals were created by rolling paint and linear marking. Layers and repetition of color shapes and organic profiles formed the surface of emerging and recessing planes. This series began during the pandemic, each painting and drawing form an abstracted sense the feeling of repetition, chaos and also nature, focused on color and line.
In Traffic/Landscape on Steel I painted bucolic landscape from a vantage point of a car driving down highways, the oil-painted images skewed and merged onto metal detritus such as car door panels, shaping playful wall-sculptures. Meadowlands, New Jersey used this same imagery painted in oil from life and also from a corresponding satellite view concurrently. These addressed privacy and personal vantages through images collected from Google Earth along with my own photographs.
An oil painting series on canvas and paper, Suburbs, Cemeteries and Thoroughfares and the series Pearlbrook Drive fused imagery of my hometown from memory and newly-taken photographs, attempting to make sense of the confluence of time and distance.
Austria Album was comprised of images using acrylic and oil-paint on screens of perforated steel, and charcoal drawings, that used family photographs from my grandparent’s vacation in the Austrian Alps, before their lives were upended by World War II; the historical photographs were matched with current Google Earth views from these same locations.
I grew up in suburban New Jersey with parents who were recent refugees from Shanghai and Vienna. In 2023 I became a dual US and Austrian citizen. I live and work in New York City and the Hudson Valley and am a Professor of Art at Pace University in New York City.