Artist Statement
“If objects and events in the world were merely haphazard and arranged in no especially significant way, their particular arrangement would still be mysterious. But the fact that the contingent features of the world are also ordered or patterned is surely deeply meaningful.”
Paul Davies, in The Mind of God
My work is in some small way a reflection of the order and pattern that Davies refers to.
I believe that the most effective art reflects the artist’s thoughts, ideas, emotions, experience and knowledge.
I grew up on a farm in Nebraska. The earth has always been a part of my person. Natural repetitive patterns on the farm (spring, summer, autumn, winter; planting, cultivating, reaping) are a part of my experience.
My first degree is in mathematics and I was a high school math teacher in my early 20s when I started painting. Mathematics is a part of my experience and knowledge.
My early paintings were landscapes. The landscapes morphed into abstractions of natural forms and by the time I was working on a master’s degree in watercolor painting I had added a mathematical structure of nature (the Fibonacci Sequence) to the paintings. The Fibonacci Sequence consists of the numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, . . . and those numbers fit spiral structures found in nature: sea shells, pine cones, phyllotaxis of plants, etc.
All of my work is about creating order, the same as nature has created order.
