Small Excursions into Colour and Form
Artist’s Statement

The purpose of the Excursions is to draw the observer into one of the artist’s most essential experiences.

The artist searches around in the creative unconscious with some tool in the hand (whether it be brush, pastel or sewing machine) and mixes colours into form until those forms have been given the scope and integrity to “set sail of their own on a sea of white”; the artist’s white surface, whatever that surface may be made of.

In the Excursions each piece is a coagulation of colours whose shape and mass can sometimes verge on the recognizable. As shapes they are potentials only, abstract, inert, only about to shift into greater awareness of themselves not there yet.

For me these are the explorations of the creative unconscious before everything became defined and named. Full of clear, even light (where colour can be fully itself) they are the expression of an inclination to explore what is not yet declared, not yet chosen, not yet owned.

Not so much imitations of as translations from painting these began as water colour studies on paper.
As thread what they gave up in transparency and immediacy they gained in brilliance, texture, momentum (the visible action and direction of the stitch).