My goal as an artist is to use imagery to penetrate the veneer of everyday appearances, to activate and bring to the surface latent and surprising possibilities within. Primarily, my process is about the freedom derived from re-arranging a set of givens from the visible world.

I am inspired by settings in nature and the urban environment, and in them I see a vivid contemporary folklore. By re-fashioning these elements according to my own narrative, I can animate them with new meaning. I can levitate elements, patch flat fields of color together, and paste phrases from commercial signage to building facades, like poetry on paper. My painted work is concerned with inventing  new urban spaces, fictitious alleys, courtyards, and strip malls that derive from my experience of Miami’s built environment. Pattern is central to my imagination, and provides a pulse, a visual rhythm to all my work. My collage process is mediumistic in that I gravitate toward found printed matter gathered from varied sources. Printed matter from the 1960s and 1970s attracts me. Each of my collages comprises a single scene edited out of a larger continuum, a page from an endless book or a frame from an animated movie. A major source for my work has been hand painted manuscripts from Persia and India. In all my work I’m interested in achieving grand decoration using economic means.

Miami has created opportunities that have afforded me a great deal of personal freedom. Miami’s unique live/work economics plus the relative solitude here make an equation that allows me time to pursue new outlets such as video, public commissions, and hand-made rugs, and to write on art. I’ve found an incredible group of artists to collaborate with who challenge me aesthetically and technically. The look and the structure of the physical city of Miami has provided great raw material for my work, because I look at it with an outsider’s eyes. The modernist architecture and flat color treatments on warehouses synchronize with my own aesthetic. The experience of driving through blighted and abject areas of Miami has absorbed my attention in a new way, coming from a walking city full or street life like my hometown of New York.

MW