The Process

Two feet ahead of me exists a still life built from dead flowers which remind me of little humans. Some of them interact with each other, some aimlessly exist without the expectations of communication. There are broken shards of glass that project towards me on a spice rack like shelving unit, allowing the bulbs of some flowers to appear as if they float in space. Others physically do float, hanging by mono filament from the ceiling. There are chunks of mirrors which add complex spatial extensions to a still life only eight inches deep. There are a few rocks and some other things, but mostly it consists of the flowers.

The more I investigate this set up the more visually interesting it becomes. With time the flowers appear to have a greater luminosity and their humanistic qualities become more evident. I rebuild these set ups after each group of works. The last one being a series of three vertical paintings; whose names recently became Transparent Stairs, Subterranean Truths, and Birth of the Snow Flakes. They became a narrative of the past half year of my life, telling a story of demise and rebirth through the energy of abstraction.

This new still life is geared towards horizontally formatted paintings. It is about four feet wide, maybe eighteen inches from top to bottom and eight to ten inches deep. It takes many eye movements to be able to comprehend the entirety of it. The visual rhythm entices the eye to constantly explore beyond its field of view.

The curiosity of what exists beyond the periphery of vision is the birth of imagination.

It is the movement of the eye and the desire of the mind to record unique bits of information which allow me to drift into abstraction. Each shape I record is carefully cut out of real space. The physical resistance of the drawn line becomes necessary for the authenticity of that moment in time. I draw small pockets of space, and then work on the color, and back to redrawing new spatial relationships. The color in these acrylic paintings develop through the rebuilding of edges and the editing out of unwanted information, it is building color through drawing.  

Ideally I would like to change the idea of representation to one of re-creation. I find the process of working from real space to attain an “abstraction” to be one of transforming a spiritual experience into a physical organization of energy. Imagine looking out of a window at dawn or dusk. The exterior is lit by a glowing blue violet, allowing enough light for one to identify the exterior space. The same pane of glass contains orangey reflections of the interior of a home, which is lit by incandescent or some other kind of light. On that pane of glass is the lucid existence of two different realities at a specific moment in time.  I want my paintings to be about the metaphysical existence, but to have that I need to unite both worlds.

Painting can transcend the ordinary experience to the extraordinary, and vice versa. There is no way I could preconceive what a painting may look like in before I start it, or even what kind of color it will have, or rhythm. During the course of my normal day I may find myself getting mad or feeling a strong lust for something, these energies will affect what I choose to focus on when I get into drawing the shapes of my still life. What we experience affects how we see the world, maybe the opposite is true as well, I don’t know.