STATEMENT OF WORK

In my abstract paintings, I explore the potential of colour and atmospheric space to produce visual experiences of affect.  To accomplish this, I pursue perplexing abstract configurations that are inextricable from how I craft the material properties of painting. By making my own oil paint and gesso from pure pigments, I am able to tune the sheen, transparency and colour saturation with my visual language of lines, shapes and framing devices. To produce radiant areas of saturated flat colour and nuanced atmospheric depth, I methodically apply and blend numerous layers of translucent and transparent paint. Enmeshed within these diffuse spaces are pictorial forms that are delineated with wobbling and trembling edges that are ruptured by the occasional errant drip. From this abstract language, I seek to activate a diverse array of embodied responses, ranging from playful encounters to absorbed states of contemplation.
    Through these means, my aim is to sustain the viewer’s engagement with the abstract image of uncertain meaning.  In an extended viewing, the nuanced complexity of colour and atmospheric depth is progressively revealed, even as the abstract image continues to elude coherent identification. Gradually, the initial stable image becomes increasingly malleable and the composition appears to move and shift as colours fluctuate in intensity.  Through this durational unfolding of optical experience, it is my intention to enrich and expand the viewer’s visual acuity to frame the dynamic and unstable nature of perception itself as a subject matter for contemplation.