b. 1962

Dorothy was born in Alexandria, VA in 1962.  She began studying art in her mid-thirties, after a move to Charlotte, NC.  After relocating once again to Charleston, SC, she studied art seriously at the College of Charleston, where she received a BA in Studio Art in 2000.  She began painting on glass shortly after the birth of her daughter in 2002.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Working in reverse on double panes of glass, using women's magazines from the 1950's and 60's as source material, I make multiple drawings with ink and acrylic paint, continuously scraping away and re-applying new imagery and color.  As I work, a narrative, however ambiguous, begins to assert itself, and the original context is subverted.  Subjected to my hand, the imagery bears little resemblance to its original source.  My method and media elucidate the obsessions which occupy my mind as I work.  The imagery's containment under glass, and the fragility of the glass itself, suggests preciousness, impermanence, and preservation.  The juxtaposition of this delicacy with the jumbled layers of associative images, which are scraped from a jarring, dissonant palette, intends to convey an exquisite contradiction.  This is analogous to our contradictory notions of memory and how it informs identity, human relationships, and life in general.  I am amazed at how comforting, even when disturbing, the myths of our personal histories can be.  The idea of transience and its relationship to memory's frustrating lack of lucidity continues to absorb me. 

The recent addition of pattern and hand-drawn, screenprinted imagery into the paintings has pushed the work further, giving me room to experiment, utilitze repetition, and really overload the visual information.  In this way the paintings become a visual expression of our attempts to preserve and process too much information, with too little time.