I have been profoundly affected by the art and culture of India since my first visit in 1999. This experience helped initiate a necessary break with prior work although there are threads of continuity that have traveled with me both geographically and psychically.

The language of the body and the metaphoric potential of gesture has been an enduring theme in my work. Although gesture has been described in the past as having the capacity to express “motions of the mind” or “effects of the soul”, I am most drawn to simple unconsidered moments that may evoke more or less than their deliberate or accidental intentions.

While the figure is sometimes isolated in order to focus on gesture alone, in most images I situate it within architecture that serves as a visual container, spaces that can feel both protective or foreboding. Some of my recent paintings are on small sheets of antique paper and because I cannot decipher the script I appreciate the beauty of language as abstract form. As the figures appear to be so mute, the words serve as a visual metaphor for sounds beneath the surface seeping out from the edges.

Pico Iyer comments that in travel one is “carried off into a sense of strangeness, an expanded sense of possibility that strangeness sometimes brings”. As well as observing the world around me, my paintings also reflect the destabilizing and transforming solitude of the traveler whose destination is not always known or understood. Travel is like a parallel universe where the urge to find the familiar in the unknown is paired with an equally strong desire for the world to remain inscrutable.

My experiences in India have transformed my life and my work. Because of this I now often look at the same things in a different way. The Sanskrit term “Tirtha” is defined as a ford or crossing point between the transcendent and the everyday. I enjoy the paradox of this concept as I am drawn to images that not only shift back and forth from banal to beautiful but also from mundane to metaphysical, not necessarily in a place deemed sacred, but also within oneself, in a fleeting moment in the midst of activity or in the enduring rituals of daily life.

Pico Iyer, ‘Sun After Dark, Flights into the Foreign”