In my work from the last ten years (Islands, Abstracted Landscapes and Black Drawings series) I am interested in exploring how we have associations with certain visual cues and pictorial conventions which create certain perceptual expectations.

I want to complicate the visual experience by supporting some of these conventions while undermining others, by having multiple visual languages concurrent within one image and by having areas of the painting in direct contradiction or conflict with each other.  The psychological space of holding simultaneously and contradictory beliefs or perceptions—that tension is what interests me in exploring as an artist and producing in the viewer. 

Islands

In the Island images, a series I have worked in since 2003, I have consistently upended perceptual anchors such as curving or tilting the horizon line, having something in deep space overlap something in the foreground—leading to huge spatial/scale shifts and inversing rules of atmospheric perspective when it comes to color and sharpness.  I want these shifts and the dissonance they create to almost happen imperceptibly and for this I use the cinematic dissolve as my inspiration and visual tactic—one thing seamlessly blending into another so that you are seeing/believing one thing and then gradually another.  Part of complicating the experience of the images is also in the polymorphic form of the Islands themselves which have human, animal, vegetable, and mechanical attributes and can hold these different categories simultaneously so that the paintings can be both figurative and landscape, fusions and icons.

Abstracted Landscapes

In the Abstracted Landscape series I have continued my interest in upending visual expectations by plugging in abstract color into a landscape which is based on a real space.  Using a plein air approach to find certain spatial relationships as an armature for the image, I then used color and pattern in an abstract way to directly contradict the linear perspective of the drawing.  I felt as if knowing that the space was real and then uncoupling the color from this reality would create tension of a simultaneous experience.  My latest experiments have now been to use local color but to plug this into the ‘wrong’ spaces (earth color in the sky area, florescent light in the shape of a cast shadow).  Instead of looping back into realism, I have found that using known spaces and now colors in a counter intuitive way creates almost more psychological tension between what we expect visually and what we experience. 

This increased visual and mental tension I think comes from the echoes of the recognizable and how these cues encourage a greater subliminal belief into the landscape thus making the distortions more intimate.  I’ve begun researching into this idea of holding multiple states simultaneously.  In the work of Oliver Sacks he delves into the physical, perceptual and psychological ramifications of this kind of simultaneity. This experience of complexity seems relevant in terms of contemporary life, technology and contemporary painting. 

I am also continuing to use several paintings techniques—graphic, blurred, gestural to more patterned so that the experience of seeing the painting is also a multiple one.

Black Drawings

In the black drawings I explore this idea of visual associations through polymorphic form—oftentimes architecture with figurative elements such as bunkers that look like heads.  Technically, the limited palette of whites, blacks and grisalle gives the impression of apparent simplicity, clarity and seamlesness.  Black becomes a vehicle for much of this polymorphism—it functions in a perceptual way as a lack of light, in a graphic way as a shape, as a void and a mass.