IMAGES | STATEMENT | RESUME

I remember once when I was very young I had the mumps or something like it, so I was quarantined to my bed room. While there I was brought toast and jelly for breakfast one morning, I scraped off the jelly onto my plate and finger painted it onto the walls of the room. I don't remember "painting" an image but just the act of following with my eye the motion of my hand which, I guess, was guided from something inside me. I remember being very aware of this act and the state which it would allow me to enter. I also would spend hours inside cardboard boxes just big enough for me to get into punching holes into the sides that would create images on the inside walls of the box. I don't know why I did these things, but I spent a lot of time alone like this.

Later in life, maybe at seven or eight years old, I found this same feeling while staring out windows and allowing my eyes to become "unfocused" and not seeing anything clearly but being intensely aware of the atmosphere around me and the fact that I could go somewhere else, and I reveled in this state of quietness.

This I think has been my goal all of my life, to be quite and still inside, because in my conscious life I am everything except. In the end I think that I have very primitive and simple ideas about who I am and what I do.

I paint what I need, not where I am.

I have read a quote from the artist Anish Kapoor that sums it up perfectly. I am not sure if it is his statement or Mr. Kapoor quoting a Buddhist teaching.

"the most important things that one's working on are not necessarily the most important things that one thinks one's working on".