The many-hued paintings in “Wallflower” represent a catharsis, punctuating the end of a period of extreme isolation. After the shared solitude of the Covid outbreak, I was further sidelined by a diagnosis of blood cancer.

Excluded from socializing while undergoing treatment, I spent my days in the studio and the shaggy garden that surrounds it. My perennial companions were the local flora and fauna. While sitting things out, I focused on working and waiting and invited imagined partners to spin into my space.

The results are a group of paintings that are very different in their process and color-relationships, yet still linked to my past output. I could now really take my time and see what came up. These blooms spring wholly from this extended musing and an urge to anthropomorphize. They are purely invented and non-existent in nature, embodied in variegated brushstrokes on color fields of mutable, iridescent pigments.

It is a wet-into-wet process wherein nothing may stand still including myself, each piece being executed with full body engagement. Movement is an aspect of composition and function – both color and sheen shift as the viewer takes a step and realigns their view.

I imagined a garden of blooms in airy, watery spaces, or barely held captive by a vase. In my hopes, these flower figures possess a self-confidence and spirit that transcend earthbound woes.

It is now a world where nothing is alive without peril. This hard-won period of studio output reminded me it is also a paradise, where each day may see nature rising again to flourish still.

March, 2024