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Perhaps a sense of longing for some exotic and wild "Nature" compels me to hang branches and twigs in my studio. But once the branches are in the studio, the grid of architecture asserts its presence. To articulate the interaction between the grid and the natural forms, I've built three-dimensional perspective grids out of string and wood around the branches.
These hybrid structures--with both natural and built forms--become the model for my paintings. They're set up in my studio as still-life objects and lit with incandescent bulbs.
In painting from these structures, my goal is straightforward: to build an equivalent sense of light and space with minimal means. The grid helps me find points in space and plot the perspective of each mark--especially when a daub of paint is referencing a bit of air in the middle of the room. Sometimes I think of my gaze as a laser beam programmed to gather bits of information -- proportion, color, value -- between two points in space. Translating this information into paint results in a line that is specific and schematic at the same time.
Each mark contains calculations for location, light, color, and gravity. The paintings are made of these multi-part decisions, which gradually accumulate. This is true of most painting, but I mention it, because I want to show my process, to reveal how I got from one point to the next, in hopes of building a concrete relationship between each part and the whole.
Some of the paintings have a smooth ground made out of thin washes of warm and cool colors, implying a space in which the mark can operate. In other paintings, the ground becomes very textured from the buildup of marks. Whether simple or complex, I'm interested in how the surface reflects ambient light creating a kind of mirage that hints at the image as you approach from the side.
Although my paintings are structural, what I'm after is the tension between things falling apart and coming together — creating a flash of recognition, even if the source is unknown — a nexus of manmade and natural architectures.
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