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Artist's
Statement
It was while I was completing my undergraduate degree in biology that I
realized my love for the discipline was more aesthetic than genuinely
scientific. So I changed my focus and got undergraduate and graduate
degrees in printmaking. I later began painting seriously for want of a
press; acrylic is currently my medium of choice. In order to surround
myself with the strangeness of life, I have been collecting and growing
cacti, succulents and other desert plants which, in turn, attract all
kinds of birds and insects. My mid-city yard has become a hotbed of
pollution, predation, regeneration and sexual display (mostly
invertebrate).
The look of this work owes a lot to my fondness for earlier styles of
depicting animals, particularly the copperplate engravings that
illustrated Buffon's Natural History (begun in 1766), as well as Victorian
animal portraiture and old scientific illustration. I have tried to
present similarly earnest, but basically inaccurate, renderings of animals
by using humor, irony and a surrealistic sensibility that is not available
to the scientist. What I want most is to impart to the viewer a sense of
wonder and strangeness that nature photography and video, in spite of
their inherent capacity for precision, cannot.
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