Formerly a professional sign language interpreter, I now translate into drawings the personalities and dignity of individuals. I work with charcoal on frosted Mylar, a polyester film. This tough, translucent support allows me to aggressively build up marks and then work the charcoal with erasers to reveal a luminous quality of light. The sitters assume frontal, uncompromising poses and look directly at the viewer, turning the observer into the observed.

Drawing is my primary navigational tool. From there, I’m able to paint, animate, and collaborate with others. My paintings, constructed on plaster supports, involve sanding away and layering paint in ways that can create uncontrollable ghosts. I work back and forth—adding, manipulating, and subtracting— allowing a dance between representation and abstraction and ultimately providing a surface on which to work through issues of relationships, attachment, emptiness, and a constant need for space.

I am attracted to the abstract qualities of landscape. As I view myself as a conduit between the formal and the spiritual in my work, I aspire to have my paintings reach beyond words, perhaps to transcend the landscape to a deeper place.

Until recently, most of my paintings since 1990 were based on the rural landscape within an hour drive from my home. A gently rolling former prairie, I am attracted to its melodious, abstract and subtle beauty which despite man's intervention evokes a subdued and understated energy. It is an area to which I remain connected because it is where I grew up. I worked to develop a personal response to this familiar environment, endeavoring to make something extraordinary from what is so familiar and from what some say is a banal world.

My work deals with personal and social narratives that are more oblique than obvious. The images I use are primarily recognizable, whether they be human, other animals, the surrounding environment, or our own creations. Through the use of materials, imagery, and titles of varying origins and connotations, an awkwardness is created in which elements of both comedy and tragedy exist.

My recent paintings are urban landscapes depicting industrial recycling facilities. One series of paintings depict a paper recycling facility next door to my studio. Everyday I see a stream of semi trucks pull up next to the plant, disgorging mountains of used paper and cardboard boxes. The paper is dumped in a concrete yard at the side of the building and forms a constantly shifting landscape that rises and falls, spreads and recedes as the days pass. Every so often, the paper must be sprayed with a water cannon to keep it from catching on fire.