Artist statement-

The book Popeye and Olive and the series of prints that followed began with a silent retreat I attended at a Zen monastery that included a course in Chinese calligraphy. The course involved painting the same character over and over again, as if repeating a mantra.

After the retreat, I continued the practice on my own. My personal aesthetic tends to be minimal. I like reductive forms. I like to work with constraints. I also come from a musical background, so patterns and rhythms are important to me. So I set myself the task of painting shapes in sequence without thinking too much about them. I'd paint 50 of them in one evening and examine the results in the morning. One day, one of the shapes reminded me of Popeye's silhouette.

I decided to riff on Popeye’s silhouette and created a series of blue variations. The next day I tried the same thing based on the Olive Oyl character, but this time in red. When I laid out all my paintings, I had the impression that they were images from an animated movie; I could see a sequence unfolding. I could arrange the pages to suggest an encounter, an advance, a rejection, a return. It was now a relationship.

I continued to improvise numerous combinations. It became a coded system, abstract but still very readable. The new forms expressed a continuous relationship of the couple's interactions: strengths and weaknesses, dependence and independence, domination, competitiveness, moments of tenderness and humor. It had become an abstract love story.

These relief prints from laser cut veneer woodblocks are a result of that exploration.

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