COMMUNICATING Paintings

All of these works have many layers of paint and other media embedded underneath the surface layer; two of them also have handwritten phrases, in pencil, underneath that top layer. The phrases in the pieces came to me first, while painting; the title and theme of the series jumped into my mind much later.

As I lived with the finished paintings, it was as if I were looking at a seismograph that recorded how intimate partners often communicate (or don't) with each other. A visual representation that documented the speech and emotional rhythms—the “movement”—of communication. I could see and “hear” in the paintings this communicating: the layers of conscious / unconscious meanings, thought patterns, presumptions, extreme emotions and misplaced opinions, sarcasm, faux-listening, excessive emphasis on the same point (each painting with text has only one phrase repeated over and over), and a glimmer of truth buried under it all.