As an artist, my work has spanned multiple mediums. My abiding interest has always been in language, and for most of my life I focused on building vessels to carry it:  books, stories, songs. Recently, though, I have begun painting with beeswax. In encaustic, I have discovered a new language and learning it is changing me. I am enthralled by the complexity of the medium, by its changeability and all the paradoxes it holds–fragility and strength, memory and forgetting, opacity and transparency. The process of painting with wax is a conversation with itself, materials and layers often interacting with one another in unexpected ways. As I learn the vocabulary of encaustic, I am gaining some control and foresight into how the medium will behave, but I am still constantly surprised. 

I am always thinking about sub-currents and underbellies, the felt but often unseen forces at work beneath the surface of things. In art as in life, I am interested in what is astonishing, beautiful, haunting, but partially concealed and potentially unnoticeable. Encaustic with its layers of varying translucence, lends itself well to this fascination. Everything can be transformed and hidden, but also revealed and rediscovered. My scraping tools have the power to unearth buried artifacts of my own making, the heat from my torch creates a temporary rush of memory before the wax cools and loses its glimmering transparency. 

In my painting, I focus on the interaction of texture and light– the way light changes a piece, catches an edge, glows from inside. Most of my paintings are abstract landscapes or aerial views of earth, almost always involving water. I am essentially always trying to capture the eerie, dangerous prehistoric lake where I sometimes swim in my dreams. I  have yet to succeed, but in trying I have found other places that are vaguely familiar and equally compelling. I think of them as emotional landscapes.