My paintings are partly figurative but also combine different elements, different images and materials. I hope meaning can emerge from the images and ideas that the viewer can link in a personal way. I would hope connections can be made in the mind of the viewer between images and materials set in a background of silent geometry. For me geometry is a metaphor for the true background of reality which is universal, limitless and that from which physical reality emerges.
David Hinton’s book Awakened Cosmos describes Chinese Classical poetry with characters, often derived from pictographic sources, linked in an almost grammarless way, and the reader must link the characters’ meaning in their own mind. Without explicit connections the reader must provide connections, actively engaging with the poem. I would like my paintings to work in the same way, putting down some concrete references to be taken up and linked in an internal realm.
Gaston Bachelard’s book, The Poetics of Space, elaborates on mental categories that are particularly evocative and lead to extensive reverie. I look for visual images that are particularly evocative for me. Daily life is now so inundated with images that I don’t know if powerful images exist anymore but I try to use images that work for me for inducing thought and recollection.
I also think about different ways of looking at something. Ideas shift, moods change, nothing is static. I to use geometry to pull an image away from straight representation. I like geometry as a background for everything. As far as images, I don’t think an image is unitary and complete but is something one can look at and see in different ways at the same time. I don’t want to paint a literal image of something but rather try to engage the idea of an object. I like uncertainty and I want to incorporate some of that uncertainty in a painting. I use geometry to pull the image away from simple representation. I want to remind the viewer that this is not a literal representation but a bit of color and line on a surface.
