Pop Art
At some point I needed to stop painting landscapes because I became fascinated with isolating the objects in my paintings. I’ve come to believe that actual sites and places have an individual magic. The goal is to take objects from popular culture and paint them into a new context. First, I pulled the palm tree out of the landscape, (in fact, the same palm tree), and painted it in many different colors. Then, I bought dozens of canvases and began to paint the silhouette of the Life Guard Tower more as a pop art symbol than as a landscape element.
From that Monkey Brain leap, I began to paint bits and pieces of board games. My husband Jim has been designing and inventing board games for thirty years, and our homes and studios are filled with games and playing pieces. These playing pieces are a part of everyday life for me, just like palms, towers, and flags. So I’m painting the object as a symbol in the context of living in Los Angeles, the cultural capitol of the world, living with pop art and pop culture.
Board Games
Does everyone else have that memory of that perfect summer afternoon, spent playing board games at the cabin with the smell of rain in the air? I'm fascinated by the response these board games, in their bits and pieces, evoke in us as adults. Sure, there's the tug of childhood and nostalgia, the innocence of playing a game with clear rules and clear winners. But there is a quality of otherness I experience when I paint a row of dominos, or my favorite monopoly mover, or the last piece of the puzzle. Whenever I look at a flag, or a chessman, or a pile of Scrabble tiles, I know that these are iconic symbols that existed before memory. Somehow, they live in an unconscious dream-realm where they represent something more than the detritus of playtime.
Scrabble
