The Elastic Continuum

As with all art that I admire, mine also emerges from a conversation of the present with the past – my images are drawn from a broad repertoire of historical references that have been distilled into a private iconography. My current practice could be compared to that of a stage designer building environments for plays that are written in reaction to the props being built. In this sense, I paint scenes on an imaginary stage, rehearsals of shape and color configurations in which the abstract forms are not so much actors in an unfolding plot but more like semaphores that only give signals, leaving viewers to draw their own conclusions. My compositions convey meaning but they do not offer up a cohesive narrative, because I simultaneously want them to be read as constructions, as visible discourses on the business of painting, of the quest for solutions to formal problems.

An important aspect of my process is that I need something pre-existing, a found object in the widest sense of the word. Everything I do originates from something observed, something given which I then subject to various degrees of transformation. I am preoccupied with pattern and texture; everything I see has the potential to become a visual stimulus – a geometric abstraction, a color field, a tangible or ephemeral shape, a decorative surface, a referent of an architectural period. Through collage and, in my sculptural work, assemblage, I combine representational depictions of reality with shapes whose origins may be architectural but are, for all intents and purposes, non-objective. This imagined reality in turn informs my depictions of the seen – I deliberately cultivate a discrepancy between the abstract overall organization of an image and the various motifs and narrative fragments, unlinked and existing side-by-side as separate entities. In painterly and sculptural terms, my compositions are precisely structured but they do not engender logical, unambiguously definable relationships.