Artist Statement
I am a full-time, award-winning artist, living and working in Albuquerque’s South Valley. My work is included in the Encaustic Art Museum’s permanent collection, featured in Encaustic Art in the Twenty-First Century (2016), and numerous catalogs. Major work was recently purchased by the Bernalillo County Art in Public Places program.
My work has always been about identity, which I see as formed by genetics, place and language. I have worked primarily in encaustic and acrylic for the past twenty years. During the Covid 19 pandemic, I took an online course and added cold wax medium and oil to my toolbox of useful mediums.
For the Anniversary Exhibition, I have experimented with a new substrate, Tyvek. Tyvek is light weight (easy and inexpensive to ship, and doesn’t rip tear or develop holes, as paper does. In this exhibition, Tyvek replaces canvas, paper, and panel substrates as my preferred surface. I return to my favored medium of acrylic for the paint.
The subject matter remains my love of language and symbols. The scrolls incorporate text from many languages, including Persian (Farsi), Hebrew, Chinese (oracle bone script) and Native American petroglyphs (which I view as a language). In most cases (except for “Writing on the Wall”), the text is not meant to be read or literally interpreted: it should be viewed as just another beautiful shape. In some cases — either deliberately or accidentally — the text has been altered. I do not try for perfection and view the alterations or mistakes as actually serving to make an image more original.
