Sediment

About my painting, Sediment ... which is an homage to Henri Matisse

Sediment is what settles... what gets deposited by time and carried forward into a new era. That's how I think about art I love, and it's how I feel about the impact of Matisse's work.

This piece began the way his late cut-outs did, with paper. I cut shapes by hand and moved them around on the canvas until the arrangement felt right, stacked and balanced, suggesting a figure without ever settling into one. Then I traced each shape and filled it with ultramarine blue on raw linen primed with clear gesso, leaving the weave exposed so the linen itself does the work of the paper.

The edges are clean but not perfect, on purpose. I wanted to keep that hand-cut feel, the sense of a confident snip of the scissors, even though the final piece is paint.

I paint homages to honor the artists who shaped me. This one is a thank you to Matisse, and a small deposit of my own on top of what he left behind.