The Attraction of Abstraction

I've always been fascinated by the aesthetic expression of nature in all its immeasurable variances. As unique as natural articulation can be in our world, recurring shapes, arrangements, and compositions permeate all things expressed in our environment. But it's the sensual characteristics of these articles - both living and inanimate, that truly interest and hold my attention. I'm instinctively drawn to this tacit-like sensory consciousness, the free-verse poetry if you will, universally shared by organic and inorganic elements. My work reflects an ever-evolving recognition of this unity, an exploration of form and color to gently arouse an emotional response to physical fatures in their most primitive state. The viewer is left to uncover the masculine and feminine in nature, and to intuit their own erotic place within a hierarchy of inescapably sexual categories of living and inactive things.

I typically extract imagined circumstances from real subjects when conceiving a composition, oftentimes drawing ideas from plant life, rock formations, moving water, animal features and the like. But what I'm really striving for is to connect the untrained beauty of nature and natural forms with the corporeal associations familiar to everyone.  The way a ridgeline on a hill can infer the arch of a woman's back. The way a shadow cast in just the right manner can call to mind the stretching of a bird's wing in flight. Seeing continuity in disparate things and being able to express that relationship without constraint is what attracts me to abstract painting, as does the opportunity to express myself without the boundaries and traditional controls found in other conventional styles of art.

My journey to become a painter is proving to be an endless source of wonder, and I think about what the word, "journey" connotes for me. Movement from place and perception - not just getting from Point A to Point B. Most of life's journeys  involve elemental processes and progressions of state. A scope of life passages produce shifts in state of mind. We grow into who we are as a result of our experiences, our choices in choosing one road of travel over another. In choosing the path of painter, I'm eager to give up the life I've come to know in exchange for a new and exciting "other life", rife with possibilities and potential, peppered by self-doubt and uncertainty.

My work is the result of ideas and impressions about my own personal life journey thus far. Each painting is a culmination of some of my most private thoughts and inner conversations concerning the iterative nature of self-realization and perpetual change. All things are evolving into something else. Yet it's human nature to view this process in terms of loss somehow. My goal as an artist is to engender a state of intimacy and understanding within the viewer. A greater awareness of self, surroundings, others. Fundamental perceptions of separateness and isolation coax a spiritual connection between human beings and the physical world. At the core of our attention is always the universal search for meaning and purpose in life.