Through surfaces that shimmer and reflect through space and time; by creating diaphanous sheets of layered images, I address the phenomenon of change. Paintings akin to whispers reveal themselves to those that observe small changes in hue and surface. Preconscious thought, reduced down through burning, becoming remnants that echo of a grander existence. Themes of change pervade my practice, I seek to reveal to the viewer the metaphysical aspects of nature that work in the peripheries of our lives.
Three series of works build up the body of my creative practice. The first of which is my abstract script work on paper. This series is meant to evoke on the idea of preconscious thought. I use polychromatic pigments in this work to represent the ephemerality of thought and idea. Layers of script weave in and out; depending on the light creating a shifting surface that acts as a metaphor for how ephemeral and hard to grasp thought and ideas can be. In my second series of works I utilize burning as a form of creation. Abstract script becomes the embodiment of my stream of consciousness, strokes of the brush become a language of movement and line. By burning these streams of consciousness I question the nature of thought. Thoughts become action, action leads to consequences, but when thought itself is so intangible what does it mean to be confronted by that intangibility? What happens when you take something as precious as our thoughts and emotions, give that a physical form, and then destroy it only to leave remnants? My newest works are my whisper paintings. What can a whisper be? A whisper as a painting becomes a slow and faint thing. To realize this I use close, dark values layered to resemble a fog, color appearing to rise to the surface just long enough to fall back into the haze. I build textures that diffuse light in different ways to create a shifting surface. My goal is to create a painting that becomes like a living entity, changing with the light to reveal itself in unique ways through time and space.
The artist as a modern mystic is an idea that motivates everything in my art. I explore the idea of the origin of thought with my abstract script. Through abstract script I explore the role of language as image. When I take the form of Taoist cypher and synthesize that into new variations, how does it become like image? Does the notion of how a language should appear block us from being able to see it as shape and form with positive and negative space or are we locked in our perception of it as language? Burning streams of consciousness becomes an investigation of ritual, to confront a viewer with the remnants of ritual rather than the ritual itself. When a space becomes littered with these remains what does it say? I find meaning in Bruce Nauman’s quote, “The artist makes the world a better place by revealing mystic truths.” This becomes motivation for my art, to reveal the mystic truths that lie in my cultural history, and to reach through time and bring these mystic truths to the present to see if the metaphysical revelations of the old Taoists stand true through time.