ARTIST'S STATEMENT
"Our response to cruelty, suffering, and sorrow is to remind the world of the face of beauty, which can best restore a man's tranquility, cleanse his heart of all evil, and lead him to the path of truth." --Anita Amirrezvani from her novel Blood of Flowers
"The divinity which is the science of painting transmutes the painter's mind into a resemblance of the divine mind." --Leonardo da Vinci from his Treatise on Painting
"Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks."--Plutarch
"Flower painting is the refinement of still life."
"People seem to think that anyone can paint flowers. On the contrary, almost no one can paint them well."--Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst from his The Painter in Oil
"By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined the divine as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers." --Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I paint to witness the incarnation of the divine in the natural world. Its beauty is love in physical form. For this reason I often choose to focus on the translucent nature of my subjects, which suggests the divine light held within; and my compositions are carefully constructed on the armature of sacred geometric forms and proportions, mirroring their counterparts above.
My Rosefire Series is a body of work inspired by T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. In the 1990's I developed the concept of rosefire, and made it the subject of a body of oil paintings. The notion ends Eliot's poem, where he quotes the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich in the following stanza. The first two lines belong to Julian, but Eliot concludes with his own image in the last three:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Rosefire is my attempt to depict that even in our darkness/ignorance there is a lifesaving light. When it seems as if all is lost, we can walk in darkness and trust that a light is burning brightly just beyond the peripheral edge of our vision.
I often work in series. Although my subjects vary, I gravitate towards the figure, translucent objects, water, clouds, and reflections of all kinds. They all have an exquisite way of reacting to light and mutate or change from moment to moment, creating a sense of urgency in the painting process. My oil painting methods are traditional, without the use of solvents. My technique and compositional strategies are classical, but innovative.
"The divinity which is the science of painting transmutes the painter's mind into a resemblance of the divine mind." --Leonardo da Vinci from his Treatise on Painting
"Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks."--Plutarch
"Flower painting is the refinement of still life."
"People seem to think that anyone can paint flowers. On the contrary, almost no one can paint them well."--Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst from his The Painter in Oil
"By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined the divine as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers." --Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I paint to witness the incarnation of the divine in the natural world. Its beauty is love in physical form. For this reason I often choose to focus on the translucent nature of my subjects, which suggests the divine light held within; and my compositions are carefully constructed on the armature of sacred geometric forms and proportions, mirroring their counterparts above.
My Rosefire Series is a body of work inspired by T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. In the 1990's I developed the concept of rosefire, and made it the subject of a body of oil paintings. The notion ends Eliot's poem, where he quotes the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich in the following stanza. The first two lines belong to Julian, but Eliot concludes with his own image in the last three:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Rosefire is my attempt to depict that even in our darkness/ignorance there is a lifesaving light. When it seems as if all is lost, we can walk in darkness and trust that a light is burning brightly just beyond the peripheral edge of our vision.
I often work in series. Although my subjects vary, I gravitate towards the figure, translucent objects, water, clouds, and reflections of all kinds. They all have an exquisite way of reacting to light and mutate or change from moment to moment, creating a sense of urgency in the painting process. My oil painting methods are traditional, without the use of solvents. My technique and compositional strategies are classical, but innovative.