"I’m a person who lives by questions and awe. Listening to music, holding a conversation, lingering at sunsets and mountain streams, looking up at tall buildings, all are incorporated into my work and support my craving for passionate consciousness. In my work I try to make each color, each line and its spacing create that opportunity, in both harmony and tension. I don’t title my works because I want above all to leave them available to the experience and discovery of others.
I grew up in New York City. My parents were hard-working people. Aside from the bible, there was almost no literature in my home and I found few ways to learn about the larger world. But the fundamentalist Christian sect my parents belonged to held its meetings evenings in the still rooms at the China Institute on 65th Street. As the preaching of the elders melted to rhythm and cadence, I plunged into the intense color and the abstract forms of the ancient porcelains and ink paintings surrounding me. I became aware of universal art.
In that circumstance I was fortunate to meet people who opened up the world to me in other ways. In high school my English teacher read Robert Frost and e.e. cummings aloud. I hadn’t known until then that clouds and fences and things we see every day could be luminous. The Chinese son-in-law of one of the church elders gave me my first brushes and paint. Through him I was introduced to Bing Gee in Chinatown whose studio was the first I ever entered. I remember it reminded me oddly of the tool and die shop where my father worked.
Bing Gee in turn introduced me to sculptor and painter, Michael Lekakis, and his friend Harold Weston in whose company I began to love the conversation and the history of art. It was Harold Weston, creator of the legislation for the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Council on the Arts, a precursor to the NEA, who bought the first painting I sold. The colorist painter Herb Aach helped me with the technical aspects of acrylic painting.
The work of Bauhaus painters Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers released me to a new use of color. The New York school of painters, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Ad Reinhardt, as well as color field painters Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, further expanded my vocabulary. Eventually I was able to travel to museums and archaeological sites in Asia, Europe, Mexico and South America and to find there the universal expression of ecstasy that is art’s great capacity.
I’m in awe of the refinement of form that I find in the Sung and later dynasties, as I’m in awe of the history of the mountains near my home. I see my work as part of that universal process in nature and art of change and refinement. In balance and harmony, I’m constantly seeking refinement. In tension, I’m seeking the questions. The process is endless. Its exploration through color, form and line has been the search of my work and my life. "
From an interview with the artist, by Judith Chalmer