Artist Statement

My work explores the ambiguities inherent in the picture of the modern, perfect, middle-class family. I peer in from the outside and look around from the inside. I am, after all, inside both as a mother and as the child of such a family. Yet, I am also outside by definition.

I emerged from the ordinary. I can think of no family background more banal or commonplace. A series of American 1960s style suburbs Cincinnati, Detroit, Boston, New Orleans, Chicago. There was no end to the cities my traveling salesman father took us to. To outsiders ours was a respectable Christmas card picture of an intact American family. Inside, all was chaos and alcoholism. The one point of connection was my mother's drunken narratives, the regaling of riveting family stories and the gleeful revelation of family skeletons. Stories of adulterous cousins being shot by jealous husbands, deformed wives wed to Latin lovers, lives wasted with nothing gained or learned. Myths without morals. Narratives remain my method for exploring the world.

My paintings present the complexities of everyday life from a "side door" of the house, using shock and humor to probe such topics as birth, sexual objectification, motherhood, loss of security and home, refugees. My goal is to examine the everyday, to tunnel into the underground labyrinth of our private world, to suggest a reality hidden from view yet constantly on display. My preoccupation is not just the untold and the unspeakable, but the layers of normalcy that cover them and make them acceptable.

Tapping into my background as a documentary film editor and screenwriter, I refer to narratives that can be partially decoded, understood emotionally but not fully, invoking the darkness of childhood memories. Those memories flow into the conflicted emotions of childrearing, childhood seen from the adult perspective and adult relationships. While each part of the narrative has a specific meaning I leave it up to the viewer to bring their own narrative to the painting. I investigate how much information about the narrative must be disclosed for the story to be glimpsed as a coherent whole.

Using oil bar sticks, marks that resemble a child's scribbles and often bright friendly colors I hide the horror of my narrative in the paint for the viewer to discover. The marks themselves, often harsh jagged slashes, mirror the emotions conjured up by the subject matter. Heightening the emotional temperature of the expressive mark-making are passages of carefully rendered paint, repeated schematic images and geometric painting. The more detailed passages of paint slow down the viewer allowing greater contemplation. Painting styles bump against each other and sometimes cross boundaries, contaminating the contamination.