Statements About the Works and the Making of them

 “ I collect fragments of paper, ephemora, objects and segments of my own paintings. When I put the works together it is usually based on relationships that I see between the fragments. The process can sometimes feel like chaos but through drawing, painting, sanding, rolling and encaustic, they come together. It is the journey that I crave. The resulting work of art provides as Julian Levy once wrote “a persuasive, convincing new species, made from the irrational discovery of joining the utterly dissimilar”.

The Stackable Collage Boxes

Pop art, antiquities, architecture and design elements transcend time periods and meet through the wonders of simple collage. These collages are assembled from found and created objects and ephemera then finished with wax encaustic. They are meant to be stacked , to be reconfigured.

On the  painting , "Mr Sax Man"
 
  "Although Mr.Sax Man is a rather large painting ,he began with a small piece of collage material that had been hanging around the studio for about a year. It was an old segment of red leather that had been a part of  a vintage writing box . There were red loops where pens and letter openers would have been slipped in . I had inserted two treasures in those loops - a snake that had been flattened by a car and left to dry, and a rode-worn strip of metal. over the year,whenever I saw this collage segment, I was reminded of the kind of pocket protecters that fastidious workers wear to hold their pens in their left breast pocket. And so, Mr. Sax Man began as a pocket protecter.
    As I built the shirt from sheet music and began to layer the background collage ,it became clear to me that this was to be a jazz musician. The picture would pay homage to Romare Bearden. The musical instrument of choice grew out of a set of vintage paper  Christmas ornaments. They perfectly formed the keys of an alto saxophone. Though the outdoor landscape seems an unlikely setting for a jazz musician ,to me it conveys a sense of his ease with the world. His red lips are from the same leather writing box and his polka dot tie is from an old silk dress. They declare his playfulness. Proportionate to his "axe" he's a large man. He is a worker bee among sax payers -strong , solid , peaceful,and joyful. Mr. Sax Man celebrates the greats in the jazz world who have kept me company in the studio for years."

Brilliant Corners a Journal of jazz and Liturature 2004 vol 8 no.2