Artist Statement

My work has taken a variety of forms in the last several years including room-scale drawings on delicate rice paper, printed works, mail art, and collaborations incorporating sound and the written word. I embrace experimentation as I probe the nature of materials and the potential of abstract language to communicate at a visceral level with the viewer.

My experiments led me full circle to a renewed commitment to the practice of painting and to the realization that everything I am presently trying to communicate with an abstract language can be put forth from the surface of a painting. Moments of enlightenment come and go, and I am thankful that I rediscovered a joyful process, an open-ended path to the infinite possibilities of paint.

Recent abstract paintings reflect an ongoing inquiry into process, perceptual fields, and dualities such as transparent vs. opaque, chaos vs. order, and nature vs. artifice. Working on the floor, I shape these process-driven paintings through time, building up sequential layers of oil atop a color-filled acrylic ground.

I look at my paintings as camouflage, as painted patterns that exist of themselves "flickering with color and line" and patterns that reveal and conceal underlying visual information. When contemplating the masked lines with their defined edges and degraded interiors, I think of the graphic nature of alphabets where combinations of clearly defined letters convey meaning "meaning that may shed light on or obfuscate information with turns of phrase."

However helpful metaphors are in writing about the work, my interest lies in drawing one's attention to the painting's surface as a perceptual field and the marks left by the process such as the contours created, much like Barnett Newman's "zips," from the absence of the masking tape. Ultimately, I intend these paintings not as just throwbacks to modernism, but as rigorous artistic gestures that reflect an embracing of history, a critique of contemporary culture and a distillation of the complexities that interest me in the age of information.