In these pictures I seek to reconcile into speculative narratives elements taken from three different spheres: the distant, complex, and constructed realms of social, cultural, and political history; the equally complex and constructed, but closer to home, autobiography of memory, nostalgia, and desire; and the empirical data of the physical world that surrounds me and is directly experienced through the senses.
For me, painting and drawing are ways of thinking through an image – in progress they should evolve and reveal. Balance and finish are elusive and shift within each successive stage of the picture’s production. Craft and material engage in an intimate relationship with drawing and composition. Light and shadow, form and space, emptiness and weight, as well as shape and volume contribute to the ultimate content of their psychologically evocative narratives.
A work of art is understood to possess its own forms and structures, distinct from reality, but apprehended through its relation to our understanding of the world.
This conception underlies the pictorial logic I have employed in these works. It is of uncertain relation to the world we inhabit, combining elements of a fluid perspectival order with a splintered array of visual paths leading out, around, and through the rectangle of the picture plane. The viewer can move through the composition as a means to its apprehension, imaginatively inhabiting it through the experience of material and illusion.
Within the mark are contained traces of the truly awesome in nature—the gesture and rhythm of a churning eddy in the Athabasca River or the curve and flow of smoke pouring off a burning stick pulled from a campfire. The relationship between visual abstraction and representation of the world around us is fluid. Within these pictures it is the gesture and flow of many small marks that together constitute the whole – forms and spaces and the light and shadow that renders them visible.
For me, painting and drawing are ways of thinking through an image – in progress they should evolve and reveal. Balance and finish are elusive and shift within each successive stage of the picture’s production. Craft and material engage in an intimate relationship with drawing and composition. Light and shadow, form and space, emptiness and weight, as well as shape and volume contribute to the ultimate content of their psychologically evocative narratives.
A work of art is understood to possess its own forms and structures, distinct from reality, but apprehended through its relation to our understanding of the world.
This conception underlies the pictorial logic I have employed in these works. It is of uncertain relation to the world we inhabit, combining elements of a fluid perspectival order with a splintered array of visual paths leading out, around, and through the rectangle of the picture plane. The viewer can move through the composition as a means to its apprehension, imaginatively inhabiting it through the experience of material and illusion.
Within the mark are contained traces of the truly awesome in nature—the gesture and rhythm of a churning eddy in the Athabasca River or the curve and flow of smoke pouring off a burning stick pulled from a campfire. The relationship between visual abstraction and representation of the world around us is fluid. Within these pictures it is the gesture and flow of many small marks that together constitute the whole – forms and spaces and the light and shadow that renders them visible.