ARTIST

Kayaking on a Cloudy Day
I paint things that I love and things that I find amusing. As a former journalist and novelist, I am drawn to anomalies: a kayaker in a bright orange anorak on a dreary day, a group of women in tutus standing in front of a massive waterfall, a woman wearing a fur coat and a straw hat at the beach in winter. These all could be writing prompts, but I've made each of them into paintings.
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So I paint representationally but not with the goal of verisimilitude. In the past year, I've been drawn to the ease and simplicity of the iPad, its wide variety of brushes, the use of layers, its forgivingness as a medium and the luminosity of a painting against a backlit screen. But lately I've returned to acrylics, which have the same intensity, but allow you to paint bigger and to actually mix colors rather than merely picking them from a digital color wheel.
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It's my goal to paint loose and fast -- and to give the viewer mental space to draw in the fine details rather than painting them myself. This requires knowing when to stop, a skill I am working towards.