Painting is above all a process. Rather than being products of preconceived ideas, as the landscapes and seascapes my paintings may suggest, each image represents—if anything—a departure from certainty. By way of an internal dialogue, itself the product of whole-life unnamable experience, the paintings emerge as if with voices of their own: Madder Lake under the smudge of a soft cloth announces itself; Chinese Orange begs attention with a slick of the palette knife: as one color speaks, others answer, all mirroring the dialogue that transpires moment by moment in my mind.
A paintbrush, too masculine a utensil, too defining a tool, does not lend well to this zone of uncertainty from which the paintings originate. Rags, knives, fingers, sticks, or the drip and trickle of turped-down cerulean, allow each image to develop as if out of a primordial soup: sky and earth become interchangeable, indeterminate phenomena. In homage to the spiritual aspect of creativity, the world and its apparently defined structure is left in a state of formation and potentiality, where everything is possible. If, within this primordial zone of pure creation, you asked for a triangle, it would dissolve in a drunken stupor.
My intent is to visually communicate a play of contradictory forces, disruptions and shifts where no message is delivered, no names are named. “Sites,” in fact, however innocuous the title may be, gives more meaning to the paintings than they require. These paintings are my experience of navigating through the fluctuations of meaning. Painting is an engagement with the ambiguous and the unknown. (written by Marcia Clay after a conversation with Martine Jardel)
