Mértola Mosque

oil on canvas, 123cm x 183cm, 2025

This is one of a group of works entitled Invisible Cities/Hidden Towns completed in 2025 following travel in Portugal and Perú and describes the melding of cultural influences across the centuries in a remote corner of Iberia.

Color and form shape my thoughts and are shaped by them. I work to construct a dialogue and tension between color and form to animate a narrative. If the medium is not the message, it serves--Goya's black and white Disasters of War can't be ignored. Neither can Hockney's serene Yorkshire landscapes bathed in color, and joy. Both remind me that, as Wassily Kandinsky said: 'Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions.'

I am drawn to history and the history painters, to myth and the myth makers, both historic or contemporary. The physical space created by the stories we tell ourselves--whether religious or political-- provokes me to rearrange it from another perspective. In recent work created during an artist residency in Portugal I reorganized the physical spaces in the village where I was staying in order to shine a light on the contributions from its Islamic past and also to highlight the dramatic effects of climate change in this corner of Iberia. Another residency in Perú offered another view on history which gave rise in 2025 to a group of large paintings titled Invisible Cities/Hidden Towns.