ARTIST STATEMENT
" art that comes from a place of depth and sincerity really can move people; it can resonate with our spirits and communicate in a way that we don't fully comprehend."
I am concerned primarily with the effect that my paintings produce. To experience one, simply choose one that you like, and spend at least a few minutes with it. If you see an image in the painting, enjoy it for a bit, and then let it go and return to the painting as a whole. Look at a different part and then repeat. Eventually your mind begin will cycle through the compositions and/or experience the painting simply as a collection of marks. Think of the painting like you would music and feel it's rhythms and tones and simply enjoy it as an experience.
Rather than creating images intended to be viewed and processed analytically, my goal is to create paintings that, through an almost hypnotic kineticism, inspire a meditative and emotional response when viewed over a period of time.
In order to do this, I use layers of overlapping and interwoven compositions that cause the eye to switch back and forth between patterns. I paint rapidly at first, allowing myself to create instinctively, trusting the experience that I have gained from a lifetime of mark-making to generate an extremely active surface containing a huge amount of visual information.
As a counter balance, I then spend just as much or more time on the last ten percent of the painting, perfecting colors and placing bits that complete, balance or combine compositions, and allow the eye to easily slip from one design to the next.
The result is a space that is plastic and indefinite, marks trading places in the visual field depending on the viewer's focus and distance from the painting, and forms that may at first seem primary dissolving into fields of color and motion, only to have new forms emerge.
My work draws from varied sources, including formal abstraction, abstract expressionism, graphic art and graffiti. The inspiration for my artwork, however, is not formalistic or art historical, but rather comes from my own synaesthetic experiences. Strong emotions, music, and sensations trigger hallucinatory responses of color and motion that are more intensely meaningful to me than any concrete objects or symbols.
While I realize that these sensations are personal experiences, I feel that there is something very pure and universal that they can communicate, the closest I can come to directly sharing an emotion with another individual.
I try to capture these effects, creating work that moves and changes, confusing the eye and momentarily pulling the viewer out of their concrete, day-to-day lives and allowing them to slip into a more receptive and meditative state. At this point, the viewer's mind stops trying to analyze the piece, and simply allows it to resonate emotionally.
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While I followed a relatively direct path of development early in my career as an abstract artist, I no longer think of my work as evolving in a linear sense. Instead, I see the different stylistic elements that I use as a field of possibilities from which I can draw in order to create my desired effect. All of my paintings draw from multiple emotional and stylistic sources, and my progression as a painter now feels like it is continuing on as a tree that has branched off from its trunk in all directions, as I incorporate new elements, variations, compositions, and combinations into a style that feels distinctly my own.
There are times that I have to laugh at myself, up until 4:00 AM, putting little hot pink triangles over layers of moss and ultramarine, but painting really, genuinely, does feel that important to me. I believe that art that comes from a place of depth and sincerity really can move people; it can resonate with our spirits and communicate in a way that we don't fully comprehend.
My hope is to create work that is earnest and universal, and to share something that wouldn't be possible to express in any other way.