Artist Statement
My characters use masks, mirrors, or games to invent visual narratives. I bend perspective and distort light and color to combine the "home" of daily living with the "other world" of memory.
My painted stories explore a pervasive dilemma of the contemporary world: the dissociation of people from one another and from the past. By the time I was thirteen I had visited twenty-three countries in West Africa, Europe and Asia. My pictures "map" my memories of foreign lands, and allow me to explore my experience of globalization.
Stylistically and technically, my work revels in the painted image. By combining the fantastic and the ordinary, the disoriented and the stable, I find the foreign and the familiar can coexist. I use the sensuousness of the medium to seduce the viewer long enough for my troublesome subject matter to be absorbed. My paintings offer imagery for appreciating today's disjointed experiences.
