Before Words

Each work in Before Words begins as a folded sheet of paper, cut by hand and unfolded to reveal a bilaterally symmetrical form, then layered over a richly painted ground in mixed media on paper. The grounds are not decorative choices. Raw sienna, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, and terre verte are among the oldest pigments in human art-making, found in cave paintings, Byzantine icons, and Renaissance frescos. The forms that emerge from the studio process converge with those ancient surfaces: glyphs and totems that look like they belong to a civilization that understood the world as a single continuous system, before language divided the natural from the sacred.

These four works, Ancestor(Terra Diva), Threshold(Oro Antico), Ardor(Terra Rossa), Depth(Verde Memoria), are made for people who trust what they feel before they understand what they see. The hope is that these forms do what the oldest symbols have always done: stop you, hold you, and leave you with the quiet certainty that you have seen this before.