Ladies' Lunch Painting

For many years I've been creating "Peoplescapes," oil, sculptured characters and applied objects on canvas, addressing cultural, political and spiritual issues facing society. By juxtaposing people in recognizable places and situations, each painting weaves together a story about contemporary life, filled with layers of detail, symbolism and humor. "Plane slashing" is the latest progression of my 3D technique building up the canvas; lately I'm tearing, cutting and manipulating the plane of a painting, while integrating it with one or more finished canvases attached. Painting into the deconstructed imagery as a whole, leaving various portions of the underlying picture(s) in tact, results in a cohesively transformed multi-dimensional piece. As this work evolves, the experience is liberating, moving from chaos to destruction and on to an intuitive composition somewhere between abstraction and surrealism. Everyday, I take the brush to canvas and, although I am confronted with fear and insecurity, I also tap into a limitless source of imagery. In those moments, time falls away and it seems that the work creates itself.