Watercolor Paintings
Like words left unspoken, a beat of silence in music, or someone’s absence, a tension develops between a seemingly empty space and the mark or material pressing against it. My intention is to reveal this tension as a form of yin yang, the Chinese philosophical belief that seemingly contrary forces are interdependent and complementary. My paintings are informed by two apparently opposing styles: sumi-e and gestural abstraction. The former achieves the greatest expression through sparse yet carefully executed brush strokes, while the latter relies on the physical act of applying paint as an integral aspect of the work. As a student of the written Japanese language, I am intrigued that individually simple strokes, combined, convey complex concepts within a single ideogram. Deconstructed rather than painted according to strictly prescribed stroke sequences, these marks take on a personal meaning that I reveal through color and movement. Stage 5 is a series of paintings I made after my mother’s death. The series is an expression of acceptance using the fewest gestures possible. White spaces press against strokes of paint as a person’s absence presses against one’s presence.
Collages
After my mother’s death, I acquired a collection of journals I had kept when I was a teenager – volumes of daily handwritten documentation that had been stored at my parents’ home. At the same time, I acquired hundreds of cards and letters handwritten to my mother during the last several decades of her life – letters she had replied to with hundreds of handwritten letters of her own. Instead of corresponding in long hand, most of us now choose to communicate more efficiently by e-mail or cell phone text messages that can be deleted in an instant and are rarely saved. As my own calendars, address books and notes increasingly take on digital form, my handwriting appears on fewer pieces of paper. Decades from now when my home is cleared out, there will be few, if any, handwritten letters to uncover. My collages are made primarily of pages from those journals and letters that neither my mother nor I could discard, as well as paper ephemera that contains handwriting. Regardless of the content they carry, handwritten text is a unique, personal mark of the maker that I value more as it becomes harder to come by. Torn into small bits to obscure their content, the handwriting yet remains visible and preserved.
