Artist Statement Painting is a pleasure seeking process for me, and abstraction a vehicle with which to think. I was a nature kid, brought up on horses, vegetable gardening and canoe vacations. I often have rapture over single flowers and walks in the dunes. I also look at paintings a lot. Matisse and Ellsworth Kelly are important artists for me. Influences are vast, and inspiration constant. In my painting process I push the physicality of paint as subject on it's own terms, as well as respond to temperament of place and experience. Works are initiated by prompt intuitive marks and gestures; in an indulgence of play they are scraped, pulled, smudged, spilled, unapologetically forced or delicate. I am patient with my work, and I like to study it after this first burst of energy. I like to give the paintings time to exist in their initial state that I consider one stage of completion. I look at them for a long while and have tea with them. I puzzle over gestural features and look for facets of line, precise shapes, open, closed, graphic forms or how a crude mark might come naturally. Then I analyze the works again formally. I hope for patterns to emerge and be disrupted. I work to realize inherently beautiful structures stable enough to be destroyed or reconstructed, to open and shut rhythmically, or to melt away a preconceived idea of what the painting is. Selected Exhibitions and Collections 2015 Melanie Parke and Richard Kooyman, Anne Loucks Gallery, Glencoe, IL 2014 Lois Dodd Juried Show, First Street Gallery, New York, NY Solo Exhibitions 2012 Tory Folliard Gallery, Milwaukee, WI 2011 Anne Loucks, Glencoe, IL 2008 Modern Arts Midwest, Lincoln, NE 2006 Wright Gallery, Northport, MI The United States Department of Interior Richard DeVos Traverse City Chamber of Commerce Education 2010 New York Studio School 1989 BFA The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL 1988 Oxbow Summer School of Landscape Paintings, MI