These paintings are based on patterns found in land, water, and sky. The spaces are somewhat familiar – there may be a sky, horizon, and land – but then things shift, and what may have been sky becomes water. With the next look, everything may change again.
Fundamentally, my paintings are about us as humans in the vast physical world. They are about the marvel of existence as well as the unknown around us. They also relate to our inner being, which is fluid and creative.
All paintings in the Horizon series emphasize a feeling of space and light. Most of them also have visual references to water or sky. The paint strokes strongly suggest movement.
My abstract landscapes convey the density of matter, the luminosity of voids, and movement. Some paintings are more literal landscapes while others only suggest an open environment. All of them, though, allude to the space around us and within us. Both spaces are vast and at the same time transitory and ever-changing.
They are influenced by the history of landcape art, especially those expressing transcendence, like paintings from the Hudson River school, the American luminist painters of the late 1800s, or the photographs of Ansel Adams. All suggest landscape paintings do more than just record surface features; they also convey our own moods, attitudes and emotions.
Rich color and complex surfaces are important in these paintings, as is the gesture and the movement of the paint. They all deal with a landscape-like space within a vertical format, emphasizing the up-and-down movement of elements in nature.
These recent abstractions evolved from a prior series of mine, the Wild Biology series, which contained literal representations of nature and combined them with abstract painting.
Wild Biology Paintings are based on the concept that our world, which appears solid, is mostly a void with dispersed specks of matter animated by vibrating energy. In developing a visual equivalent for this fundamental quality of the physical world, I looked for natural phenomena that have an open “architecture” or network quality. This includes star clusters, aerial views of landforms, erosion patterns, waves in liquid, turbulence, entangled plants, falling autumn leaves, and flocks of perched birds. I also borrowed from a variety of scientific and artistic sources, such as fractal diagrams or line drawings from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.
These works deal with the body under assault, vulnerable, or in a weakened condition. They stem from my own struggle with cancer several years ago, but I see them as relating to anyone undergoing great change, profound emotions, major transitions or a deep loss. I see the drawings as being beautiful and the figures represented in a classicizing, idealized manner, despite some imagery of anger or illness. The body can become more sublime as it is ravaged with age or disease. On the other hand, the drawings are an attempt to redefine normalcy, saying that this is normal, and then to equate normal with beautiful.
The drawings were executed with conte or charcoal, and were manipulated with water washes or erasers, so that each drawing contains the act of applying and dissolving marks at the same time. This acts as a metaphor for times of great change. Many of the drawings were also photographed throughout the process of their being drawn, and those photos were used as the basis for digital video sequences with added sound.
The paintings of figures in water are representational ways to show that some major life changes affect both our physical bodies and our emotional states. I had read that in the chrysalis stage, the body of the caterpillar liquefies and then reshapes into a butterfly. That idea of the liquefied body fascinated me. Our bodies look different, look liquefied, when submerged in water. The partly-submerged body became a means for me to visually express the changes that occur at birth, puberty, middle age and death.
This is a collection of one-off paintings, or works from older series.
