This page represents work from 2024, particularly coming during a sabbatical from teaching for the spring semester. The sabbatical included times of intensely making work and intensely taking work in – and back again – due to time in my studio, a four-week artist residency in Italy (an hour south of Florence), and time spent studying and sketching works in Florence and Venice, Italy, northern Bosnia, and Zagreb, Croatia.
Underpinning much of what I have seen during this time, what has been present throughout, has been an undercurrent of artists, artistic voices, sometimes with very much and sometimes with very little, doing what they need to make something that feels urgent, that needs to be heard or seen. Whether about the now or about the past, or, more likely, about both, there is a common need to connect and speak, sometimes softly, sometimes in a scream, and sometimes in a language that takes time to understand.
I feel so fortunate to have been able to have this time to try to understand, and to explore it all through studio work – through the thought-space of painting and its continued capacity to ask questions, to physically, visually, and formally be an act of thinking, of processing what is difficult, what is possibly beautiful, and hopefully, what is meaningful.
(made possible with support from a Great Meadows Foundation Artist Development Grant, a WKU Sabbatical and University Distinguished Professor Awardee Professional Development Funding, and La Macina di San Cresci Artist Residency in Greve in Chianti, Italy)
