My project-based artworks engage an analytical eye on the environment, how we connect with and process landscape through nostalgia, history, and memory.
By working through outdoor camcorders to painting on scrap metal and perforated steel panels the work probes conventions of representation.
My parents were recent refugees from Shanghai and Vienna when they married and settled in New Jersey. The experience of being first-generation with parents starting a new life in the semi-industrial suburbs of New York forms my outside-looking-in approach to making art. Making art became a way of making sense of place. Place, or landscape art encompasses environment, ecology and also an dialogue within historical and contemporary artworks; these I use as a foundation or underpinning in my variety of works.
Animal Statuary drawings were completed during a recent residency at the American Academy in Rome where the expressive figures provided an exaggerated psychological depth to the drawings.
Chapelle Saint-Catherine du Port show sketches /drawings/paintings were developed and shown during a fall 2025 residency in southwest France installed in a 1300’s chapel.
Road Trip and Traffic/Landscape on Steel are painted from the vantage point of a car driving down highways, the oil-painted images skewed and merged onto distorted metal detritus such as car door panels, shaping playful wall-sculptures. Bucolic and apocalyptic, the paintings speak to beauty in modern industrial settings.
In Blink, using stills from an outdoor video camera, I record wildlife that share my surroundings in the Hudson Valley.. The camera’s infrared light distorts the image in darkness, a flash of light illuminating their presence, suggests an other-worldly primitive snap of time.
The Creation series, also paintings on canvas, were first inspired by Tintoretto’s The Creation of the Animals. My paintings' abstracted forms of objects and animals reference Tintoretto's painting with its frenetic energy, hightened expression and color.
Paintings on panels and works on paper in Almost New and Arrivals were created by rolling paint and linear marking. Layers and repetition of color form planar surfaces. The series were completed during the pandemic and during a time of a personal health crisis, the works reflect the calm and chaos, patience and repetition.
Painted on scrap metal, Meadowlands are painted from my source of photographs of this bucolic yet toxic site as well as from its corresponding satellite view, addressing personal vantage and privacy.
Suburbs, Cemeteries and Thoroughfares and Pearlbrook Drive fuse imagery from my hometown area in New Jersey in paintings on paper and canvas, from memory blended with newly-taken photographs, attempting to make sense of the confluence of time and distance.
Screen Memories are based from a tiny 1936 family photograph album of my grandparent’s vacation in the Austrian Alps before World War II; the historical photographs were matched with current Google Earth views from these same locations. These are painted on panels of perforated steel and charcoal on paper.
I live and work in New York City and Dutchess County in the Hudson Valley and am a Professor of Art at Pace University in New York City.
Link to discussion with Kathy Butterly from Road Trip Exhibition at George Adams Gallery on April 5, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-8te4dQv5I