MY PROCESS

My drawing, painting or sculpture process is characterized by the balance between a visual expression of what I see as well as a personal spiritual path. I experience this process as a series of investigations and discoveries. The interaction between me, the subject, and the material in a constant dialogue. In my work I want the surface to be full of life, and have developed a mixed media layering technique that includes texture, paint, and sometimes collage to form an underlying structure. In my paintings a repetitive layering continue until I feel that a sense of harmony is present between these physical components and the evocative aspects of the subject that is being depicted.

My current series of artwork is related to my spiritual search and beliefs,  where the human spirit and nature itself connect at a high level- We have our dark sides and light; parts of ourselves that we show and others we hide within. Together, this combination creates the beauty of who we are. My hope is that the viewer sees, experience and interprets my work or parts of it, in a different way each time they are experienced and find echoes of themselves in them.This is how I believe we view people, nature, and life - always seeing and realizing we are more than a physical experiment.

I generate the ideas and concepts through the creative process itself, looking for visual references that connect to the original idea and sketching them with traditional techniques or digitally. The unpredictable nature of the layering of materials that I use between the drawing, paint or sculpture will cover yet also emphasize areas, concepts, and metaphors, as I work. Sometimes the original plan changes as a natural evolution, the material sometimes dictates the high or low notes like in music, each step is a reaction to the one before. It is a constant building up of an image and sometimes tearing it down. The more layers I paint, the more interesting and thought provoking the surface becomes. 

I work with traditional techniques like graphite, charcoal, pastel, oil, encaustic or ink, gilding and more modern also like acrylics, resin, pyrography, collages with all kind of findings. The creative process of combining materials in a more contemporary dialogue fascinates me.

For me, this is a metaphor for humans and how we are shaped by what we have experienced. I use transparent materials or coats of paint between the layers so that the earlier stages leave faint traces underneath showing through, and one always sees the steps. My intention is to arrive at a balance between the order and the chaos, light and dark, tradition and contemporary expression, the physical and the spiritual, always searching for the balance, as I do in life.