I started painting in 2000 with a dedication I had not been able to make before. Once I chose this path, I knew I had found my passion and my voice. I have been painting ever since. Multiple influences inform my practice. I was born and spent my youth in Caracas, Venezuela. My family is in the Netherlands, England and Wales. Our little family of four, immigrated here to California when I was 12, after my father retired from 25 years, as head of the drafting department for Shell in Caracas. I have srtong memories of many places and they influence my painting in ways I am not always aware. In my mid 20's, I became a naturalized American Citizen. I gave up my Venezuelan Passport, because it had become so difficult to travel. California had become "my home". As a painter, I gravitate quite naturally to the vertical form. I completed a series of simplified figures, Borderlands. Soon the image evolved into pure Abstraction with the following series: Lintels and Trilithons, Palos and Cantos, Paletas y Picinas and most recently, Pentaments. I paint in oil with a palette knife and wax medium, or with a dry brush and heavy oil empasto. Usually there is much underpainting that informs the final texture and subject. I enjoy the roughness and hand chiseled experience I get from that process. Many paintings are set aside and I give myself time to get to know them and allow them to influence me more slowly in their development. Often a series will begin, and I have an internal dialogue with myself, the external world, the mark making, and the painting then gets further expressed. As my exploration continues, I allow the painting to suggest a poetic reading, that is open to interpretation, evokes the external world, eventually the mark making, becomes both concrete and evocative. |
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