biography / statement

From the very beginning of my work as an artist, I have been drawn to two related ideas: putting the pieces of broken things together, and finding form within chaos. My first series, composed daily for about a year, was a group of my own destroyed etchings, reassembled. Within each, I explored the abstract expressionist terrain of overall composition, and found order and form in the maelstrom.

My medium then became painted paper collage. I began to deliberately paint on paper, solid colors, prints and nature studies, knowing that I would take them apart and reconfigure them. For subjects I chose natural forms, textiles and pure color geometries.      

 My recent work digs deep into the bones of my childhood. I am exploring the meaning behind a variety of Hebrew texts, learned long ago, with a particular, though sometimes hidden, emphasis on the letters themselves. At the same time, my approach has become much more painterly and the size of the pieces has grown. My sheets of paper are now often modules in diptychs and triptychs.

The private dialogue between form and formlessness is still very much a motif in this series. In these, though, broken pieces have morphed into myriads of calligraphic marks.
There is a new attention to depth: storms rage not just across the page, but beyond the surface. Scale is also given new focus: skeins of tiny shapes are laid across fields of large, amorphous ones. These are stories about birth and death, angels and dreams, despair and redemption. 

My studio is at Manufacturer's Village, in East Orange, NJ.  I teach at at the Art School at Old Church in Demarest, NJ.