Personal Reflections on my Early Watercolors

My commitment to working as an artist is rooted in a desire to not only understand the world around me but to understand myself. My early years, spent in a variety of spiritual pursuits, instilled in me a meditative awareness of the deeper meaning found below the surface of life. In the still-life genre I found an artistic practice which allowed me to express this understanding.
My early watercolors were sensual in nature and simple in presentation. My love for the magnificent light of California suffused this early work with a startling brilliance. My love of flowers and an abiding connection to the primal nature of color combined to create large scale, passionately lyrical work. This work was created during the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic here in San Francisco, when my continued existence was in doubt. By celebrating this sensual and fragile beauty, I was also acknowledging its impermanence.
I came to see the still-life as a shrine that honored the tangible world. I found it necessary to explore the slippery divide between perception and illusion, which led to the creation of almost magical realist work where space, time and dimension are purely a product of the imagination. I started to use compositional devices such as changing the viewpoint to flatten the surface, altering the depth of field, removing perspective and using pattern to create abstraction. This involved an intoxicating combination of both the organic and the geometric, and revealed compositions of surprising complexity and depth.
As I look back at my work, I see a restless need to explore both my outer and inner worlds and I continue to create paintings that pay tribute to the vivid and mysterious reality that surrounds us.