What Birds Fly Through

With the series “What Birds Fly Through” I explore mark making, delineation of negative spaces, textures, and patterns.  I accomplish this through a process of constructing, deconstructing, and re-constructing. I begin by drawing a scene, eliminating and erasing portions, and overlaying lines and forms. It is a method of altering and clarifying the original scene into an expressive representation.

I intend to represent the atmosphere of the landscape allowing it to breath. By delineating the voids of space between trees, the trees become as present as the framework of the forest that confines them.  And through narrating the illumination of the falling light and the obscurity of shadow, a spontaneous quality of line and form emerges that only nature can account for.  This is what birds fly through.

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Watermark

“Nature always expresses something that transcends it.”  M. Eliade

I have titled this series of work Watermark.  These paintings are impressions taken from my days along a river.  They are painted on paper with gouache’.  I used a process of layering, and reducing the surface paint, to achieve visual depth and motion.

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 Walking Line

Walking Line combines concepts to create time lines of illusionary movement.  I conceived of them after the musical method of walking a bass line through cord progressions was explained.  This method of musical progression is used by Electric Bass players for improvisation through the repetition of specific notes in a series of musical measures.

The descriptive nature of the phrase “Walking Line” made an immediate association with a part of my own daily regime of walking a line of woods near my home.  Also, I am working on a series of abstract drawings of the woodland environs.

The works combine photographs of the woods and scanned segments of my drawings.  Both are digitally manipulated in Photo Shop.  Format, density, scale, repetition, hue, and texture are chosen to illustrate a progression of time frames or musical notations.  The pieces represent a cadence of steps taken. 
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 Origins

The idea for the series titled “Origins” came to me when I was affected by a tile wall.  I had been reading Agnes Martin’s philosophical writings about her grid paintings. She believed the grid represented the sublime experience, that is wordless and silent, from which we are separated by the world of images.  But she worked during “Modernism”, when artists like Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Japer Johns, Sol Lewitt, and Eva Hesse explored the grid and sequenced unit to express mass production, material, and the plasticity of surface.

Because of my interests and reading, when I see a grid I associate it with pixels, particles, and even cell division.  The grid in my series titled “Origins” is intended to represent these associations.  The over lying lines are representations of energy; the energy typography that is generated by and connects all things like invisible nets and webs.  And the images originate from the landscape.  I have chosen colors with hue relationships to emphasize a sense of beginning.

“Origins” are image constructs juxtaposing knowledge, illusion, and realistic representation. They are painted collages of what is known to be true and what is seen. Because I believe what Novalis wrote, “The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet, where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.” I believe we encounter the sublime when we are in relationship with our world. It is that relationship I intend to express.

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 Dry Garden

 The Dry Garden series is inspired by Japanese Buddhist Dry Gardens.  Buddhist Temple Dry Gardens are made of sand (small white pebbles), stones, and plantings.  As a devotional practice, temple sand is tended and raked daily by a Monk.  My Dry Garden works are color fields of layered paint (gouache).  I apply the paint in a repetitive stroking motion not unlike raking.  And, as the temple gardens, my color fields are ordered miniature landscapes representing meditative organic beauty.

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