Artist's Statement

I used to dance. There’s something exquisite about losing yourself in movement. Sometimes, when I’m painting, I’ll start to dance, especially if I’m listening to Reggae or Zydeco. I almost always paint to music. Being an idea person, an avid reader and researcher, my paintings manifest from contemplations on a variety of subjects --- Mathematics, The Golden Ratio, Quantum Physics, and Spiritual Matters. I glimpse connections and begin to draw thumbnail sketches around the edges of my notes. The internal dialogue is about the concept, then words gradually disappear and visual elements expand until only sketches are coming off the end of the pencil. Later, within the painting, words may reappear. I’ll have an entire body of work "idea", with dozens of sketches as potential paintings, but nothing set in stone, nothing certain. All the thumbnails represent a chaotic assortment of ideas, as if each one were a different perspective on the issue, full of the potential to explain it, but just a fragment. Only if a cluster of fragments is seen together, in a full body of work, can they explain the total concept, as if they were pottery shards that must be glued together in order to see the whole vessel. It reminds me of Quantum Physics which tells us that we are not solid, that we move and vibrate and are filled with the potential to manifest. We need only focus on our desire in order to make it real…solid. So that is how I approach the paintings. I focus on the desire to express the idea. I think about the idea…not the painting. I allow the painting to manifest itself. After working with the Golden Ratio for several years, I now have custom painting surfaces made that allow me to paint within that format. It sets the stage. It is the architecture, the structure on which I begin to build. I break up the space and then insert my one or two shapes, the initial idea, and then the dance begins. Getting lost in the painting process is the goal. It is the meditation, the prayer. It is timeless. There are no words. It is pure experience. And that experience is a joyful one. I sometimes have a tendency to tighten up in my work, to make it more accurate, precise, literal, but I recognize that as a state of distrust. I remind myself that the viewer (and the painter) CAN be trusted to figure it out. Allowing the mystery, the nuance, just the glimpse of the idea to exist in a more painterly realm makes the painting richer and more seductive. With that as my intention, the focus on giving up the inherent struggle between tight and painterly, I have recognized the duality within myself and allowed it to be. And so I paint the way I must. And I do the dance. Layer after layer of paint, I build up the surface, scraping/carving/writing, building it up like memory and digging into it in a search for the patterns and rhythms of Universal understanding. From subtle mark-making to deep cuts, glyphs/symbols, visual information--- anything I can use that will add depth---of spirit, of knowledge, of understanding, a sense of connectivity. We go back and forth, the painting and I, until the dance is complete.

Quantum Connections Statement

This body of work was conceived as a dialogue about the inter-connectedness of all things. The single thread that weaves through every aspect of our existence is NUMBER, so the focus here has been on the concept of number, numbering, counting, the history of numbers, as well as the words and glyphs (symbols) that represent numbers. The earliest marks made by man were notches, a single notch representing a single unit. Long before we had a concept of numbers, before there were any written languages, humans felt the need to QUANTIFY. And the first Quantity was ONE and the first symbol used was a single notch. In every writing system, the second, third and fourth marks were two, three and then four vertical notches. Only after “4” did it become necessary to use a symbol, because the Human Brain is incapable of perceiving a quantity of more than 4 without counting. (ie, at a glance, we can perceive 4, but when we see 5 or more, we must count 1,2,3,4,5…) That leap to the abstract concept of NUMBER opened the door to the development of mathematics, geometry, and science, all with the ultimate purpose of understanding our Universe. Ironically, in our pursuit of understanding our physical world, in the hope of understanding reality, we have come closer and closer to the understanding that nothing is real, as in solid, that reality is relative. Our five senses tell us that we are solid. Quantum Physics tells us we are not. We are in a constant state of flux, moving, vibrating, filled with worlds of potentiality. We can affect the behavior of sub-atomic parts by merely focusing on them! How can this be? How can we get comfortable with the idea that we exist in multiple places at once? To the Pythagoreans, facing the reality of an irrational number was so terrifying that they were sworn to secrecy, lest the entire world lose all faith in God, because as they all knew God created a rational world. Only by going through the unknown, through what doesn’t make sense, grappling with the inconceivable, can we ever hope to glimpse reality. Number is purely abstract. It isn’t physical. It is how we measure, qualify, quantify, describe and explain, but it doesn’t EXIST. That duality, the existence/non existence of it, changes when we focus on Number as it relates to another…as a ratio, as a product, as a sum…that makes it real to us. Makes it come to life. So, if we are all moving around like mad at our most elemental level, behaving like waves (with an interference pattern, which essentially means that we exist in multiple places at once), then we aren’t really solid. And, since what is real about Numbers is the relationship, then WE only become solid when we observe ourselves and real when we perceive ourselves in relation to others…ie, acknowledge our connectedness. In shifting our consciousness from Separate to Connected, we create balance and harmony in our lives.