Spiritualism and aesthetics...it is so hard to describe what I am searching for when I labor over a work of art. By my age, I have come to realize that there is a certain vocabulary that repeats itself even if the medium changes. In this totemic work of plaster, burlap, felt, embroidery thread and paint, there are the songbirds, hearts, wings, and fruit. These images have threaded themselves though my art since...well... years and years ago. There must be a reason, and someday I might mine my photo albums and listen to the family stories and actually figure it out... but right now the symbols flow from my paint brush, dance with my needle and thread, and trace across my sketchbooks of their own volition.
Aesthetically my work balances between black and white (I love the way Picasso used black, and how Cranach the Elder and Alice Neel used a fluid outline). Perhaps because of my Carribean based youth and my current residency in Miami, most of the work has a pitch of bright colors. One constant from my traditional western education is the rectilinear flat plane.
I don't know the meaning of these pictures yet... I work on them, adding layers or sanding layers off, until they feel right, and then, I try to place the parts in poetic juxtapositions that might reveal something of the situation of where they were made. Perhaps they are all over the map. I am going to try to find out...
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