Artist Statement

 

           (For objects of substance there is no internal frame of reference at absolute zero, and the ether does not exist.)

 

                  E.H. Gombrich describes the illusion of the sky in painting as “the vault of heaven”. People talk about being “so high you can touch the sky”, or  “reaching up and touching the sky”. I never understood these phrases. I was always closer to the sky. It was not something “up there”. You don’t have to “reach” for it. There is no distance between the sky and me. It holds me and presses against me. I breathe it in. It is in my blood and its light burns flat shapes onto the back of my eyes as color. In my understanding (and misunderstanding) of my relationship to the sky and Earth, it is not always clear where the figures separate from the ground. My paintings see the world as a painting, and the painting as a world.

 

(A universal present moment does not exist.)

 

                  Paintings are static, but vision occurs as fluctuation. I am a figure against expansive horizons. Later, I am lost between shadows of architecture. In any setting, the landscape is never empty. It is a collection of substances I move through at varying speeds, just as aspects of it move past me; through me.  My painting chases a motionless representation of an existence that is fluid, relative and constantly changing. The work intends to metaphorically, and literally, frame layers of experience without absolute states of reference. My paintings may represent the visual properties of objects, but they are also unique objects with their own dimensions and properties. My paintings are still, but their affect is synchronic.

 

(Observations about reality are observer dependent, which implies a certain degree of subjectivity.)

 

                  I paint because I believe that painting is especially adept at engaging phenomenological paradox. My paintings attempt to, through representational techniques, turn dialectic parallels toward each other, forming harmonic intersections of meaning where opposites meet; compliments without conflict.