The wood relief paintings I’ve been doing are labor intensive, requiring the painting on all sides of many elements, long hours of standing in front of a large (and scary) band saw, and assistance in screwing the work together. In order to explore ideas more quickly, in 2011, I began a series of paintings that are oil on gesso paper. I see them as both possible studies for larger wood pieces and also as paintings that stand on their own. The paper allows for more free-wheeling shapes and openess in the design of the work.

The paper pieces are done in a similar fashion to the wood relief paintings, as I use a collage technique for making elements and gluing them together with the larger shapes. Because the subject matter in this series is the same and treated in a similar way, these smaller collaged paintings still convey the same conflicted feelings an as the larger wood paintings.