Blue Bridge Painting

I’m interested in the formal, abstract qualities of highways, interchanges, bridges, and other human-made megastructures. These examples of great human imagination suggest to me the work of the Abstract Expressionist heroes of my youth; the monumental brushwork of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning or the elegant calligraphic scribbles of Cy Twombly. My work is concerned with finding intersections and overlaps between contradictory ideas and practices. In the case of my paintings, I've been embracing some of the historic traditions and concerns of landscape while trying to invoke the emotional power of pure painterly abstraction. I'm looking for the magical moment where the paint and the imagery call a truce and achieve an happy balance. This painting is from a found photograph of a bridge over the Los Angeles River, a place of both mystery and banality.