Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
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STATEMENT OF WORK
My abstract paintings use the universal language of formalism to communicate with the viewer. Flames, waves, leaves, feathers and hair — echoes of these forms populate my paintings. They are the external manifestations of change in nature. This imagery took hold in my paintings in mid-2016, about a year after moving to Portland. At first, I felt these associations reflected my personal growth, but quickly the personal became universal as the world began to radically change.
In order to better understand myself and embrace these changes, I began a daily meditation practice. Recently, through analysis of brain wave patterns, scientists have shown a link between meditation and the act of creativity. During each, there is a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which is the area of the brain that orients us in three-dimensional space. When one engages in acts of meditation or creation, one is less able to differentiate self from surroundings, barriers are lowered or even erased, and the universe presents itself as an unbroken continuum. Therefore, the act of painting is rooted in the perception of the interconnectedness of life. I make this interconnected state explicit in my paintings.
I refer to the shapes in my paintings as “colorforms” in which color and form define each other. Colorforms initially appear to lock into one another, alternately functioning as figures and grounds but ultimately collapsing the distinction between the two as shapes flow into and out of each other. I choose to paint on raw porous canvas, so that the paint soaks into the canvas and the various individual colors within each colorform can merge. The colors mix not only physically but also optically, producing phantom colors that only exist in the mind of the viewer. The brushwork within the colorforms enhances the overall sense of movement and (dis)unity within the work. The compositions use the edge of the picture plane to hold this energy in place.
If my paintings are a manifestation of personal and societal change then the forms are competing thoughts, passions and emotions, the colors are the energy given off by their interactions, and the picture frame is the border between interior and exterior struggling to hold everything together in a single imperfect vessel.