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In Japanese calligraphy the term ‘ma’ refers to the space around the brush strokes, the negative space, as well as to the calligrapher’s experience of the inner pause.
My images start after I have become perfectly still, clearing my mind of all conscious intention. With a short meditation I can bypass my rational mind, so that creative, intuitive and subconscious forces take hold. Then I paint in one continuous movement, like the verse of a song. When I lift the brush off the paper my movement continues until my energy comes to a natural point of rest. The intention is to create a whole body presence while I am painting.
Then, when I return to a piece, often to work with pencil, ink, or other media, a narrative starts to emerge. Dream-states also bypass the critical gatekeepers, so the narrative and images are often inspired by recent dreams.
The strength and power of the female form is an expression of my own sense of the four elements - air, water, fire, and earth - as I have come to understand them though a lifetime of both zen meditation and the art of the Japanese sword through the discipline of Iaido, as well as other healing modalities with which I serve my students. The brush is water moving through air to meet the earth, infused by the fire of my own presence. In this way my work depicts a process as much as it does simply an object or product to be viewed. At the heart of my vision I seek to celebrate what is divine in the female forms that I depict, illuminating their bodies as they in turn illuminate time and space.
In 2006 I had a dream in which I found myself in the palace of a Chinese Emperor who took me into a large white room filled with enormous paintings in black and white. Just as I was waking from the dream, I asked the emperor, who is this artist? His response was, “This is your art.” As Much as I wanted to, when I woke from the dream I could not recall what my art looked like. Then in 2013 I began combining my figurative realism with brushwork, and realized that this integration was moving me towards the fulfillment of the dream. I was beginning to see what the paintings in Emperor’s palace looked like.
Parallel to the integration of my art — Japanese brush and figurative realism — is personal journey, bringing together my dual Japanese and North-American heritage.
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