Artist Statement

For most of my life, I have been creating art, working with my ideas about people, emotions and feelings.  I wish to capture and portray, not just the physical and external self, but, more importantly to me, our inner selves, our relationships to each other, and to the world at large.

The human figure is the genesis of my work.  I have created a simplified human figure to express the essence of who we are.  The figure I use represents our human selves, evolving and growing in a rapidly changing and complicated world.  It is my vehicle to talk about us, as people, living in the shifting landscape of our contemporary lives.

At times, I overlay text on my paintings to provide a means of commenting explicitly on the human condition, and how I have been affected by events in the world. In particular, my work stems from an emotional response to situations and events that I have actually experienced and which have touched me. For example, the painting For Fan-Yin was a personal response to the anguish I felt after tending, at the hospital where I was working, one of the victims of the University of Montreal Polytechnic massacre. My painting, For A-26042, is about a woman I know who survived Auschwitz, where she had witnessed the deaths of her parents and siblings.

My work is not about death and the dark side of being human. Rather, it celebrates human resilience- surviving, growing, continuing in life with optimism and hope. I have always been interested in art as social commentary because I believe that art can provoke and raise social consciousness and therefore affect change.

When working with ideas about communication, I feel there is a whole world within each person, a world rarely seen due to societal, cultural and other limitations, which form a barrier to true communication and to our really 'knowing' one another, to seeing into each other's hearts and souls.  Will burgeoning technologies and mass global communication take us into the future as a glorious tapestry of humanity, or will we draw back, become more insular, fearful and alienated from each other?

My art is intrinsically about moving forward through life with love, hope and optimism.