As a student of American abstract expressionist artists in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I was encouraged not to be afraid of my natural proclivities for expressive color and a fluid use of line. By 1967, when I had my first solo exhibition in Paris, I had developed complex compositions in which both elements played a part.
Whenever I have been surrounded by landscape and sea (the island of Samos in 1976, Long Island in 1979 and 1989) both touch and a response to natural light appear dominant characteristics of my work. Works on both canvas and paper painted in New York City in 1984 and since are more dense with saturated color and vigorous drawing.
In 1985 I developed a means of incorporating hand and color within a structured format, an approach filled with inventive possibilities. Except for two series of paintings on canvas made from 1989 to 1992, most of my work since then has been on paper. The larger formats combine colored forms created by strokes of the brush or sponge with frequent drawing in crayon on horizontal bands of paper held together in a vertical pattern of collage. I am interested in the relationships between the bands, and in their combination, in which none dominates but all are held in a tense and meaningful co-existence like the lines of a poem.