untitled Painting

Holding a rigorous tension between drawing, painting and sculpture, my work is a process of finding meaning in material, a quest for a dynamic that produces the phenomenon of seeing in real time. I eliminate the context of image, language, history and literal content. Made serially, the paintings hold an allegorical dimension without plotting a cohesive narrative. Setting each panel as a stage and a container, I use line as a means to build up the potential within the ambiguity of abstraction and the physicality of pure mark-making. My paintings are created by direct physical contact with my hands onto the panel surface. Fluid, frozen, tangled, lyrical, animated by the frenetic energy of gesture, the marks are made in wet gesso, then sanded. I paint in hard edges with black, heightening the graphic quality of the gesture, then weave color to emphasize the expressionistic quality of the line, pulling edges and space forward off the picture plane or dissolving the initial gesture. Overall, the color is impressionistic, establishing an atmosphere that sits underneath the gesture. Finally, painting depth and flatness, intensity, form and tone, my handling of light and dark values depict illusionary space with somewhat the same intention as traditional handling of Chiaroscuro within a window space. Each work is a surface rent into chaos and brought back into control. Balancing chance and order, I seek to make a first-hand memory, fragile in its symbiosis with the visual experience.