I strive to create a visual balance in representing what is physical, spiritual, emotional and psychic. I believe art should simultaneously reflect our human physical world, our bodies and minds, our actions in the spaces they occupy and the spirits or souls we become as a result of that experience.

While creating art, the motion of my body is like a dance. I approach the canvas or panel, a surface, to touch it with a brush, a piece of cloth, a knife, or my hands to make a mark, or to build a form. I move away again quickly, to see the relationships begun by the new marks. As I view them, these marks determine the next. I am moving the whole time.

The resulting marks reflect who I am as my handwriting does. There is a narrative record based on the process of association, and forming representational ideas, or symbols. But, there is also what can be read in the gesture of these emotive marks. They are telling the story of my emotional states, my experience of confidence, or fear, pleasure, or pain. I mean to express, on a personal level, the universal human experience of a perception oscillating in space from the internal to the external. My art represents the internal world of emotion and psychic activity, the essence of being human.

Tonya Clay