My Process

I use painting as a meditative exercise that allows me to reflect over circumstances while mapping my thoughts. The end result becomes an illustration of the time, subjects, and narratives I encountered over the month or two working on a painting. But, as I do this I remain aware of the future audiences and seek to ultimately offer a form that encourages reflection.

Each subsequent image is then a text that asks to be "read" by considering what is seen and tracking observable elements in the image. These form narratives. Ideally, viewers would approach my paintings like they would a cloud filled sky, with no preconceived notion, but with a curiosity that seeks recognizable forms. Doing this, one finds repeated colors, patterns, textures, brush strokes, and shapes; positive space counterposed against negative; super and sub-imposed objects; and patterns that traverse the painting's field. When followed, these reframe the viewer's perspective creating labyrinthian experiences. 

I use this strategy to engage the polarity of author-and-observer engendered meaning - - meaning created by the author and the viewer. Constructed figures navigate ambiguous fields reframing their context and thus our own perception, knowledge, and definition of meaning. Following this like a narrative, a viewer experiences an objective image that produces subjective meaning which in turn expand perspectives and inspire curiosity. 

To do this, I use color, sheen, and texture combinations that produce shifting patterns dependent on perspective, observation, and incidental light.  Some patterns are revealed by a single discrete light, but many others are only revealed through the variation of incidental light or the viewer’s changed mood or position. Over time a viewer will discover myriad readings and new depths, encouraging further exploration and hopefully expanding the viewer’s enjoyment. 

Ideally, my work would be placed where cast light changes with the progress of a day and seasons. While much is revealed in the fixed and brash white light of a studio or gallery, I prefer my paintings to be long time companions whose ultimate depth is only plumbed by extended periods of interaction and observation -- surprising long-time viewers with new revelations, long-missed patterns and figures, and complimentary meanings.

I paint frames into my work for a variety of reasons: to mark the proscenium; to bound and delineate the internal text; to unambiguously state this piece is completed; and, when breaking the frames' lines, suggest that the narrative goes beyond the canvas. I enjoy the notion that by fixing a frame as an element within the painting, a recognizable character is employed and creates a platform from which an observer can reorient their own framing and freshly meander through the painting's field, bumping into subjective elements, but return to for grounding. 

Additionally, I sign each piece using a glyph, again to add another distinct and objective character, but camouflaging it as another puzzle to be sorted. I choose to do this to establish authorship, but to also create an observational-platform from which the larger piece's style, strokes, colors, and pattern can be conspicuously contrasted. The glyph itself is a stylized monogram, a highly structured, independent, and controlled figure that acts as a counterbalance to the seeming chaotic elements within the frame. Each glyph is a subordinate painting within the larger.  When focusing on the glyph a viewer is systematically removed from the larger piece’s narrative, reestablishing their external perspective. When looking closely at the glyph one sees a single ribbon tracing a route that reveals a clear path. 

From this peripheral observational platform, the larger painting's solid, fractured, straight, and swerving strokes are established as rationally applied. Both the frame and glyph act to exteriorize observers -- reorienting them to trigger a new foray into the painting. This interplay between the larger painting, frame, and glyph both activates and reflects a viewer's multiple roles, making apparent the distinction between a painting as objective text and the observer-created subjective meaning. By illustrating the viewer's multiple roles (observer, participant, and agent), I seek to both fracture and reintegrate awareness, illustrating our daily process of observation, narrative formation, and integration of experience.

In this age of easy reproduction, I have charged myself with championing the uniqueness of pure and singular art. I hold to this by creating aspects only revealed by direct observation. Photographs fail to relate substrate patterns, serendipitous figures, and narrative structures dependent on glare, reflections, and seasonal light.  Videos can capture some of this but then viewers are only following the videographer's experience and not their own. My work endeavors to refute static interpretation and provide depths only revealed over months, years, and lifetimes.