Artist Statement
I am often asked to describe my paintings by someone who has never seen them. In the past I have always dreaded this question because I didn't know how to give a simple answer. If I gave a sincere response many times it would come off sounding ambiguous, rambling, incoherent, consisting of the typical pretentious art jargon. But recently I have come to better understand what I am doing in my paintings and how to describe it in a simple way, and that is simply "my paintings are basically a combination of many different types of painting". This is of course just an oversimplified starting point.
Everything in my paintings is intentional. The complexity of the paintings arises not from a sympathy for visual chaos but from the intuitive building, combining, and layering of seemingly contradictory types of realist and abstract painting, built into an intuitively arranged system of marks, rhythms, and structures that form a cohesive image.
The abstraction is at times logical and other times it is intuitive. Sometimes it is objective and sometimes it is nonobjective. The logical and objective side to the abstraction is rooted in optics and has many times directly referenced images in art history. The term anamorphic is applied to an image when it appears to be normal when viewed from the side and distorted when viewed from the front. This technique was used in various paintings during the European Renaissance. At times will I use this technique to make representational paintings appear nonrepresentational and to make nonrepresentational paintings unconsciously representational. This is just one way I will distort an image, but I will also use other kinds of logical and perspective based distortions. I also use images of CAT scans and MRIs
The nonobjective aspects of the paintings involve intuitively building rhythms and designs in paint. I draw from visual influences ranging from patterns and structures found in nature, to stain glass windows, to non-visual influences including music, scientific theories, and spiritual and religious theologies.
The representational imagery at times comes in the form of obvious realism but at other times it comes in more veiled depictions of human and animal bodily organs and skeletal structures The skeletal images are not necessarily present to signify morbid concepts such as death but occur from integrating an interest in the human body, and life systems in general, with an architectural interest in the way objects hold themselves together, stand up, and support weight. An architect designs a structure to fulfill certain requirements related to its function. The function of design and composition in my paintings emerges from the requirement of the painting to support the tension of line, space, color combinations, and imagery placement. I move through this process intuitively, listening to the artwork as it develops rather than dictating an intellectual concept onto the painting.
