The Process

There is beauty in imagination. This makes mundane everyday experience a lot more interesting and fruitful when we can find a unique way to look at things. Take the ordinary dried up lifeless sponge everyone has sitting by their sink. It’s completely useless, but when dropped in a sink full of bubbly water, thousands of chambers fill up to make it an effective soft everyday scrubbing tool. Like the sponge, our mind absorbs vast amounts of information so that our awareness can be effectively understood. It is not necessary, for biological survival, to understand how we see, just what we are seeing.  Exploring this process of gathering information has allowed me to open up the doors of abstraction in a process strictly based on perceptual observation.

Fiona, the fleshy green plant I am looking at, hangs from three wires in a wicker container, at eye level, a foot or so in front of my head in relation to where I am sitting right now.  She pivots gently back and forth in front of an open window, the soft breeze swaying her through the southern light.  Her leaves slowly move in and out of shadows, creating a lively rhythm between the internally glowing acidy green and deep rich brown violets of the shadows.

I could not record her like a photograph would, but my drawing would be reminiscent of this moment, it would tell the story of these fifteen minutes of contemplation. Drawing her today would yield vastly different results than if I were to draw her tomorrow.  Each work session carries with it a unique state of being; it is inevitable that my aesthetic concerns regarding the relationship between shapes, colors, textures, and rhythms would be different from one day to the next.

 I approach my process by working in series, each group of work focusing on the same visual source until I desire new information. It is the consistency of studying real space through perceptual drawing which has allowed me to tap into the language of abstraction. Drawing is disciplined.  Any line I ever put on paper or wood is literally felt as if I am slicing the shape out of real space. No mark is arbitrary. Drawing the world one shape at a time is a means of slowing down my visual perception, allowing room for the often subconscious mind to intervene and play with my sensibility of proportion.  Being able to achieve rhythm in this mode of working is the beginning of an expressive architecture.

This restructuring of space creates a foundation to explore the dynamics of color, which is used to control the visual movement of the work. Each painting has a certain breath to it, its space expanding and compressing at various rates. Color will sometimes swallow up smaller shapes to form a larger one, greatly altering the speed of the work and forcing new internal structures to be explored.  The process of inventing color begs freedom, in doing so only returns mystery. Like water connecting sky and earth, color is the connective element between opposite realms, in regards to the process, these being concrete investigation and abstract communication.

I let the natural sate of mental imperfection guide the course of my paintings.

I work off of a complex yet shallowly spaced still life consisting of dead flowers, broken mirrors, bottles, chunks of glass, and a few rocks. The elements are organized on a see through shelving unit in such a way  that there is a pleasurable array of shapes amongst and in between the objects. I’m concerned with the identification of shapes, not objective identification. With any movement of my head or body the shapes that I see loose their identity.  Bouncing around the surface of the painting, I record shapes I see in relation to each other, each one influencing the next. It is inevitable that they fall out of proportion, there in lies the process of transformation.

My greatest inspirations as a visual artist are my experiences in nature. It is here, along everyday walks, where I find human characteristics in small plant life such as twigs, dead leaves, or dried flowers. I find reflections of my temperament and state of being in a world that is often overlooked.  My life’s choices, and the nature of our social structure,  are the causes which have lead me to look close within the inner workings of natural world to find connection.

This beingness that I find in nature I now seek to create  through my art by changing the edges of observed space. It is a process of intuitively moving through concrete information and drifting into abstraction.  There is little which can compare to the sensation of allowing yourself to transform directly what is in front of you into an amazing and unknown world. I hope that the finished compositions may be able to deliver a similar experience to interested viewers.