Stlukesguild

With time, however, the paintings evolved into something far more naturalistic...


Christine


Couple

Around the year 2001 my work took a sudden shift in direction. I was suddenly without a studio space and forced to create in a small office space where painting was clearly out of the question. I had long been an ardent admirer of collage and the "book arts" (in which the book is seen as a visual art form) as well as of the collage work of Joseph Cornell. Circumstances forced me into rethinking my art and as such I began to explore the genre of collage with a passion.

From the very start I began to think of collage in relationship with books and writing. The scale and the orientation I selected echoed the format of the book and of letters and the materials I selected were chosen for their poetic resonance and allusion to the world of books, letters, writing, etc... There was also a clear concern with a rather architectural or geometric structure:


Sonnet (for Emily)

While the earliest works were quite subtle... poetic... quiet... I began to look at Japanese calligraphy as well as at the calligraphic abstractions of Robert Motherwell and Antonio Tapies (among others) and as a result began to bring a greater sense of drama and contrast to the work:


Tense and on Edge


A Balancing Act


Fallen Angel

As this body of work began to expand I began to think more and more of how such work might be grouped... how a collection of smaller works might add up to something larger, not unlike a collection of poems such as added up to Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, a collection of songs that resulted in Schubert's Wintereise, or a collection of small musical pieces became Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.

I attempted to consciously focus upon maintaining something of a unified mood... nevertheless there were great variations between works that were far more geometric...


Sword of Gabriel

And those that were much more free-form or gestural...


Embrace

There were also works in which I intentionally straddled the line... presenting a contrast between the gestural and the structured:


The Nightingale Approaches


Cage