Although I feel completely at home in the digital world, it is the physical world of texture, volume, pattern, color, meaning and emotion I am interested in exploring in my work. Asian, Arabic and Western calligraphy, writing systems of all kinds, the paintings of artists who incorporate text into their work (Cy Twombly, Ed Ruscha, Basquiat), Van Gogh and the Post Impressionists, Abstract Impressionists Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, graffiti and street art have all fed this work. In the past I employed abstract calligraphies, symbols, and glyphs to create narrative. The paint application was intricate and delicate. In my recent work the writing – the word or phrase itself – is the central image, and the physicality of the material is primary. I choose these words carefully, like a poet would, searching out text that is not overly specific in meaning or association. The word serves both as the “bones” of the composition and an invitation to further reflection; an opening rather than an object. As I build the layers of color and texture, the text is at the same time obscured and expressed, translated into the numinous possibilities of abstraction.