* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
I am a frustrated scientist collecting specimens of the organic and inorganic worlds, motivated to create art by an endless curiosity for the natural sciences, the systems that govern its functions, and the relationship of those systems colliding with man’s coexistence and interference. These relationships are explored through painting, drawing, and site-specific wall drawings of biomorphic shapes. These shapes interact and respond to one another, like organisms under a microscope, spreading tendrils out into the space of the two dimensional plane.
The New Strain continues my exploration of man’s interference with the systems that govern our ecology. This new series of paintings reveal a more dynamic and complex organization as conflicts heat up. The introduction of more acid and fluorescent colors to an otherwise subdued palette supports this intensification. Fiery, biomorphic forms seek to infiltrate and infect the status quo, while interference pigments, those that produce the spectrum of color found in butterfly wings, bird feathers, beetles, and seashells, allude to the disruption of this tenuous balance. Masses of flat color reference both the built environment encroaching on these systems, and the subsequent retreat of regions considered too remote to be affected.
The abstractions evoke various organisms glimpsed in a moment of transition, growth, reproduction, mutation, and conflict. Each painting is a snapshot, a momentary glimpse of an interaction. The imagery is drawn from biological, sexual, botanical, geological, cartographic, and architectural influences. Like “characters” in a story, the shapes animate the space, and create a narrative as they appear and reappear throughout the body of my work. Taken together, individual paintings could represent events occurring simultaneously within a singular body.
The web-like ground of my paintings is created from a series of folding. This ground invokes the body ‘ intimating skin, tissue, muscles, and cellular structures. Ghosts of cellular changes are revealed in this “skin” ‘ a hint of what has occurred and is fading from view – previous battles won or lost, scars of conflict. Or possibly, these “ghosts” are indications of that which is emerging- responding to invasion, stimulation, acting as defense.
Order is intrinsic to the universe- what appears to be chaos is the action of that order. A grid or remnants of a grid system is purposefully infused into the ground during the folding process. This establishes the architecture of the space and creates a diagrammatic structure in which to compose these landscapes.
