Artist's Statement:

Throughout her life, my maternal grandmother Kimiye Ebisu studied

and taught Shodo, the art of Japanese calligraphy. I remember hearing

from my mother about how Kimiye would sit at the kitchen table late

into the night, writing a single Kanji character, then crumpling it up and

repeating this process for hours until the result was to her satisfaction.

This lesson brought an appreciation for the artistic labor involved in

gestural mark-making.

As an undergraduate student at SUNY Binghamton, I studied painting

under Angelo Ippolito, a New York School Abstract Expressionist

painter. Ippolito opened my eyes to abstraction through the simple

explanation that his work was "about paint". It wasn't until I began to

experiment with technology in my practice that I personally began to

explore ideas of abstraction and the importance of gesture.

Working digitally, for me, taps into the subconscious impulse in a

manner similar to the ways in which Surrealists used wordplay and

automatic drawing. I have come to feel that it would be irresponsible

of me as an artist not to embrace the tools of our time, namely, the

computer. Recently my imagery has begun to tread the line between

abstraction and figuration, but I have chosen neither label for my work.

In my opinion, whether a picture is considered figurative or abstract, it

is successful when it remains mysterious.