Artist's statement
My painting is the result of a lifelong dedication to music, dance, drama, and visual arts. Following undergraduate degrees in psychology and fine arts, I completed a master’s in the hybrid discipline of art therapy. My images represent the early beginnings a growing creative movement of art therapists who are artists, working within the mental health care field while toiling away on their own artistic work. Inspired by the work of early psychoanalysts such as Freud and Jung, my images represent an attempt to touch on the abstract and illusive contents of the collective unconscious. On a backdrop of knowledge from the diverse but interconnected fields of psychology and art, my images render a dream-like sensation, just as dreams render the unconscious. My work is informed by therapeutic and creative processes as they apply in art therapy. Over the last 15 years my paintings have materialized through a process of projection of symbols from the personal and collective unconscious into what initially appear to be monochromatic and shapeless clouds. As forms begin to take shape, they yield symbolic meaning through a process of Freudian “free-association”. Each painting begins with this post rational splashing about of paint on a surface without any linear or schematic objectives. The significance of each piece surfaces as the imaginal content is carved out from vague impressions. Meaning is amplified when separate pieces come together in a series like hieroglyphs on a tablet, revealing the symbolic properties of the whole. Ultimately, meaning which has long been buried can be expounded. The meaning ascribed to the symbolic dimension of the work is invariably inter-subjective and open to the viewer’s interpretation. My interest as an art therapist lies in being part of the discussion about what the work means to different people. As a proponent of the art therapy movement, I proclaim it to be the most relevant artistic movement of our time because it extends a bridge between inner and outer experience, individual and social existence, and personal and political action while emphasizing process over product. My work, as an art therapist is not art for the sake of art, or merely some aesthetic object for exclusive consumption but rather a sincere interest in opening authentic dialogue about what creative process means to different people. The political motivation of my work is to revive the vestiges of experiential knowledge evident in spirituality without religion, purpose without reason and meaning without rationality. The impetus of my painting is to question the widely held assumption that the universe is a machine rather than organism or a product rather than process. In rejection of this assumption, I paint from the “inside out”, from my truest pre and post-rational nature, without the preconceived, goals of machines or the post conceived rules of reason. Based in Jungian notions of intuition and Freudian notions of instinct, images emerge out of formless form to claim an existence on the canvas somewhere between real and not quite real. Our obsession with control should be abandoned and our genetically inherited capacity for adaptation to an ever changing environment must be called forth to fully get the image. Any sense that the viewer is in a place at once familiar and unknown is intentional. Any sense of spontaneity or déjà-vu is deliberate.