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    • Detail — Girls at Dusk

    . . . the artist's statement

    The paintings are rich, bright tales full of symbols set in scenes that seem infinite. The characters in many of them are stifled, held too closely in one instance, abandoned in the next. These are struggles with isolation. Lives subjected to a poverty of will and imagination that often resolves itself in fanaticism. These are images of an insufficient maturity, of stunted spiritual and emotional growth.

    Every child lives in two places at once. There is the world the family creates. Then there is the one the child must inhabit when parents are not around. Represented here are alternative realities. These are emotional spaces developed to bridge the differences, even gaps, between those two worlds. As children grow to become masters of their own fate, time should render these spaces unnecessary.

    Instead, for some, there is an expensive loss of freedom and potential. Masks cover loneliness, confusion and vulnerability. Most stand facing the viewer without covering. Limiting cultural expectations demand submission to a normal that doesn't always fit. Everywhere life goes on. Powerful. Objective. Beautiful. Life. It does not sustain. It does not care. Life does not love. People do. Isolated, sometimes together, empty of ambition, the children in these paintings struggle to grow up.

    Split between the souls they are and the lives they live,
    they are all fractured dolls.

    the chimera