When observing the world I imagine it as an abstract. When I create art, visual parallels of my experience occur in my work.
My work is abstract with subtle imagery of the environment, nature vs. the city, and the manmade.

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I work in painting, drawing, hybrid traditional/digital prints, and photo. I create paintings and drawings in traditional media. I appreciate them as they are, then transform some drawings, paintings, parts of paintings and drawings, remnants, and residue with digital media and photo. In addition I photograph landscapes and parts of landscapes. Most are edited with digital paint or combined into a photomontage. It is an ongoing conversation between my art in different media.
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The structures of my more recent paintings and drawings are reminiscent of analytic cubism, however I don’t start with an object to depict and then look at it from different angles. I begin by drawing an abstract structure. Currently my lines are mostly organic and only sometimes straight or angular. I try to stay within the boundaries of the picture plane only sometimes allowing the lines to leave the edge. When I paint I slowly pull out various shapes in the drawings, sometimes combining two or more to form a new shape. When I paint I’m also trying to create different textures for each shape or area with brushstrokes and abstract textures formed by dripping paint and blotting it. (In my hybrid traditional/digital prints and photographs these textures reappear). I end the painting when it feels right. I generally recognize something, an animal, object, or situation.



My titles have transformed through time. They did come from digital file names when I photographed my work. I liked the way these file names conceptually related to vision and were also abstract. Recently I have found the need to give them more specific titles in addition to give a further entrance into my work. I have also used a few Hawaiian tiltles.



I have also been inspired by the recent exhibition Animals in Japanese Art at the Honolulu Museum. I like the way animals are depicted as metaphors for human behavior and relationships with the environment.
I’ve enjoyed all the lectures and events (Ku I Ka Mana Series) this past year at the Honolulu Museum related to Kapiolani Langraf’s `Au`a.
I particularly like the Satoru Abe paintings from the 1960’s which are abstractions connected to nature in the exhibition Satoru Abe: Reaching for the Sun at the Honolulu Museum. I also am drawn to the colors he used in his paintings. I also am interested in his paintings from the 1950’s that show brown silhouettes on a white ground.
Deborah Butterfield’s bronze horses evoke a strong memory from me at Honolulu Museum. I like how the horse was originally built of sticks and then recast in bronze