new painting

This 12" square painting on panel, as yet untitled, is one that I'm planning to include in my upcoming show at Circa Gallery in Minneapolis. The surface is deeply scratched for texture and it's one where I played around with subtle shifts of white.

Things are coming along well in the studio for the exhibit, which opens on February 6. I'm starting to see more clearly what I'll include and how individual paintings relate to each other. It is not as specific or thematic a show as my previous one, which was in Santa Fe in October and featured work that had evolved out of my 2008 residency in Catalonia, Spain. This one is a bit more broad-ranging...there are several different threads of ideas that I've been following, and in some paintings at least, a slightly looser, more experimental feeling--or at least that's something I sense, and perhaps it comes through.

Here is a portion of my artist statement for the Circa show:

Since my return, the origins of my images have evolved away from the specific experience in Spain towards a more general expression of aging, the passing of time, and the accumulation of memories and history. I’m drawn to the symbolic and visual aspects of natural processes like stratification, collapse, compression, and burial. I also love the ephemeral marks that people leave behind—traces of handwriting, doodles, graffiti, children’s drawings, quick sketches. The time in Spain awakened me to visual possibilities that are all around me, and are common to many landscapes and locations.