We all create our personal complexities.  Our lives are a fabric woven of contradictions: involvement and detachment, entangling and severing, revealing and concealing.  We spend our lives endeavoring to grasp with our intellect what we know in our bones: that vulnerability is our common lot.
            We’re confronted daily with accumulations of lines in space, lines like the threads that we follow. The threads of a notion become the threads of our life. Strands entwined, binding us to one another, weaving banal details, creating visual and psychological mass that inhabits and defines our space from the inside out, disturbances in the field, obscuring our view.  
     Using painter’s mediums, layering, scraping, embedding line and color, combining the gesture of drawing with the sensuous qualities of painting, my vision has grown from its Abstract Expressionist/Neo-Expressionist roots, informed by the works of Memling, Twombly, Giotto, Turner, Guston, Hesse, Snyder, by writings of Woolf, Proust, Drabble, Pynchon, Percy, Cage, Josipovici, Marlowe, the Greeks.   I take colors out of the landscape, out of interiors, reversing them; outside in and inside out, reframing and questioning perceptions that we largely take for granted. The images are not meant to answer all the questions, but rather to act as a stimulus for further observations when we pause to be still. Guiding the eye from clue to clue, seeking to find the memory of that momentary flash of perfect clarity---- the attempt to recognize that which “we haven’t the subtlety of heart to see” [Pynchon], the paintings become visual metaphors for the process of thought, understanding and the substance of what we commonly refer to as life. -Michele Provost