Artist's Statement

On choices:

"Why me?"

I am in my high school biology lab, assigned to look at a simple plant under the microscope and sketch it's cells, which are supposed to look just like a row of stacked boxes.

Easy, only the problem is, one of my boxes is filled with something that looks exactly like an ancient Egyptian artist's rendering of a human eye. After giving some serious consideration to the concept of sketching the photo from the textbook and copping an automatic "A," I decide I must be true to what I see and hand the appalled teacher an apparently ridiculous drawing. When she stalks over and takes a look in my microscope, all she can do is shake her head and say. "This could only happen to YOU."

Art is seeing. For me, drawing is about seeing something in a subject and choosing to find it again in my work. It matter not that I see a literal image of the object that inspired me in my final product, I need to see the chosen aspect that made me decide to draw. It's much like the choices I make as a writer, when I decide that a particular moment in the paramount reality in which I live, or a single spark of my imaginings, is to become the seed or an element of a story.

Seeing is art. Someone looks at my work as sees something in it that is not expected, that I perhaps did not consciously manifest, their thinking takes a new path, and the process of making that creative choice begins again.

On subject:

The current path of my work had it's roots in an old ritual - for more than 20 years I have been a regular patron of NYC's Greenmarkets. Getting myself to a central location at an appointed time to buy produce directly from those who produce it in the region has always inspired my creativity and re-focussed my thoughts to the essentials of life itself. In a way this resulted in my first "assemblage" work" - I would always try to have these lovely farmed objects surround me in living space until they were prepared and shared as food.

In 2006 Samascott Orchards brought to Market a variety called "Potmac Pears," and while enjoying them in the fruit bowl I noticed visual qualities I wished to capture in media. However, upon viewing digital photographs I realize that the images did not contain the essence I was trying to convey. At hand, as always at the ready, were my Moleskine notebooks and pens, and I drew my first pears with little idea where it could lead.

The first simple drawings made me want to explore further, more kinds of pads, pens, pencils began to "bear fruit." As every experience in making a piece of art changes the artist's approach to the next, the work has evolved, finding form and content in the subject, then seeking to refine those themes in subsequent works, creating subtly distinct series. While my main inspiration has been found in pears, I also create series of peaches and plums. In the course of exploring in art I can and do draw just about anything, but fruit is so essential that, when asked to create a special self-portrait for the 2009 group exhibition "Black Madonna," the studies did not feel sincere until I has incorporated "my" fruits into the imagery.

Working with in the context of visual art in addition to culinary art has enhanced my appreciation of Nature as the giver or marvelous gifts - I see it now with different eyes, a sense of wonder which I work to convey on paper.