Die Number Six Artwork

Precisely Now All things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me. -Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths In school I was taught to write with my right hand. I was more comfortable with my left. We had big sheets of paper and were instructed to make lines, then circles using our whole arm. I made hundreds, maybe thousands of circles. During that time I would sit in my first art studio (my bedroom closet) and paste these circles, along with found objects into books, later adding drawings and eventually my photographs. Doing so allowed me to record my thoughts and create visual order. Combining images satisfies my compulsion to place the random into a narrative; to mix past with present and form an imagined world inside of an existing one. My work explores ideas surrounding balance, memory and time. It carries with it a variety of influences, which constantly evolve based on the relevance I apply to particular happenings in my life, and the world at large. I begin with a drawing or a painting, sometime a photograph. The pieces are fused together onto canvas, board or paper, along with various combinations of pigment, ink and wax. At some point in the process, I ruin what I’m working on and spend equal time trying to fix what I’ve ruined. The process is nonlinear and I never end up with what I originally planned. In the end, I’m still sitting in a closet, pasting together circles and found objects.