Sacred Spaces
I am always drawing myself, hand over hand, along the common thread that runs through us all. In this series it has led me on a fascinating journey, exploring American places of worship, places we go to focus on the seemingly universal human need to renew our connection with something greater than our physical selves. In them and around them, we draw close, reaching outward to form a community and inward to heal and understand ourselves, and each other.
Energy bursts from these canvases, just as the space between forms explodes past its boundaries and overwhelms the lines attempting to contain it. I use ocher and white to make a connection through time to the earliest paintings on bodies and walls that were spiritual works both in process and product. The vigorous application of thick oil paint retains the mark of every bristle of the brush and declares its authenticity as an object created by the human hand, created just as these places of worship were, to condense and channel the experience of the sacred.
