Artist Statement
Driven by my work as a public school teacher and mentor, I considered my own upbringing as a child of the 1950’s. I recall a secret life in my mind darker and more troubled than the textbook characterization of that supposedly golden era. My work shows what unseen and secret influences impact children passing from childhood to adulthood.
I choose imagery that resonates with my own childhood, iconography that evokes the world of the 1950’s. I find representations and ideas from that decade fresh and ingenuous, displaying little of the polish and artifice endemic in today’s media universe; ideal and ripe for adaptation to a larger purpose. Imagery from the 1950’s is unaffected and spare, well-suited to chart and analyze child development and eventual adulthood, then and now.
My work explores the fraught journey childhood entails. It evokes a sense of compassion and caring for the young whose paths often traverse a bramble of deceit, corruption and manipulation in a universe that cares little for their safety while elevating opportunism and exploitation to new levels of normality in the adult world.
My art compels viewers to develop a new understanding of “childhood” when they overlay a close read of my work with their own experiences of transformation, child to adult.