Panic Painting

I have long been interested in the mind: consciousness, perception, thinking, psychology, and the self. My ongoing study of these and related subjects informs much of my abstract painting. The titles of my paintings are clues to concepts that I find fascinating in the philosophy and science of mind. One idea I’ve found particularly intriguing is the notion of embodiment: that how we make sense of the world is directly shaped by the physical nature of our bodies. For example, the colors we see are due to the pigmentation in our eyes as well as the neural structure of our brain. We generally think of vision as being like photography, where an entire image is presented to us at once. However, vision might be better compared—surprisingly—to touch, since it is only through the continuous probing and movement of our eyes that we are able to construct the world around us. Notions of embodiment, metaphor, and mental “strange loops” are recurrent themes in my work. My paintings are built up through a slow, deliberate process that consists of thousands of individual brushstrokes applied one at a time. The markings (derived from the mazes I drew as a child) provide a structure in which to explore perceptual effects and the interaction of color. I design interactions between the underpainting and the mark-making and between foreground and background at multiple levels of abstraction. I strive to create paintings where the viewer will want to keep looking, from near and afar, from different angles and in different lighting, always finding something new to stimulate the eye and the mind.