Newer Works

Collage has always been the signature of my work, yet my style is consistently changing and evolving. I love finding new ways to use images, and new things to say with them. Many times, a piece starts with a single image found in a magazine, and it grows from that. Other times, I have a theme in mind, and comb through my stockpile to find pieces that suit my intention. I love how my idea grows and changes through the images I come across.

I’m especially excited at how I’m mixing my other media into my images, using collage in newer ways. Sometimes my images are now a background, or not the focal point of a piece. In the cityscapes, for example, like Starry Night, and The City Comes Alive at Night, the prominent image is the building outline, yet the buildings are built from images cut into the form I desired. In some of the pieces, like A Collector of Masks, I am focusing most on composition, displaying abstractions rather than images. The colour and geometry are the most important parts of the piece. There is no obvious imagery or theme, yet inside the shapes there are dozens of curious things to look at up close.

Of course, it is fun to experiment with different ways of using collage, but in the end, I have a lot to say and many poetic, tragic or beautiful statements to make about my world and the characters inside of it. I’m a storyteller and the paintings I create tell my stories. As much as I enjoy texture and shape and colour, it isn’t long before I come back to the stories that are most important for me. I like that my audience can interpret my work in many ways, and that the eclectic nature of my found imagery can speak on so many levels. But the stories I mean to tell are there, underlying everything, regardless of how a work is viewed or the context it is interpreted in.

Many of the past year’s work have explored themes of addiction. Hopes to Escape, Safe Skies, and Please Let Me Go are a few examples. The endless questions I explore within are freedom, self-destruction, and deterioration, from the point of the view of the watcher. In The Astronaut’s Wife, made after the death of my beloved husband, I say loud and clear with anger but sympathy, ‘meth is death, please believe me.’ Art helps me to work out the questions and hurt and hopefully speak to the heart of others who may be comforted to know they are not alone.

It seems clear that many of my works focus on loss, grief, madness, depression and sorrow. I suppose I could say that I am part of a long tradition that links artistic expression with deep melancholy. But that would imply that my scenario is special, and that is not true. Statistics say that most North Americans feel sad, mad and lost, and I am exploring that spiritual wasteland and our unique time in history. Addiction, cancer, death, fear, emptiness, loss of faith- these experiences are everyday life. Life is hard; it is a beautiful struggle. I hope that my sense of humour and irony shows clearly in my works. Despite the hard truth that there is a lot of loss in my life that I address with my work, I have an unflinching spirit that can look truth, disaster and hell in the eye and stand up in front of it. My parents gave me great strength and taught me not to hide from truth and from my emotions. They gave me my faith in God, which never means having a Big Band Aid in the Sky, but to me means having nothing to hide (and no need to hide from anything). In addition, I am blessed with beautiful, complicated and inspiring friends.

Many of my paintings are about my friends. We hold each other up.