My approach to painting and drawing is improvisational within a plan, geometric but also organic, obsessive, tangential, layered, abstract. . . .
These canvases are little worlds that I can control, the result of wrangling some chaos by conducting shapes and rhythms and manipulating light/color to create images and spaces that jive with me.
A lot of things go through my mind when I am working, such as worrying about global, political and personal concerns, to thinking about what/how people create in challenging circumstances. Both my fleeting attention grabbers (like Instagram and magazine images), and the source material that I hold close to my heart (such as favorite historical and contemporary art, textiles, quilts, and memories of special places, people and animals. . . ) serve as sparks and structures of  my work.  
For me it really gets back to the serious business of childhood coloring sessions on the playground, where intense discussions and debates about favorite colors took place regularly; and of singing songs to myself while diligently working at finding the right combo of shapes and colors, the supportive collaboration of the all the elements. . . .  I still search for that "rightness," that naive joy, that safe space on the page where all was good and beautiful, regardless of the horrors happening outside of the playground fence.