Artist Statement

    For as long as I can remember, the act of seeing has held a unique fascination for me. I have regarded it as having transformative capacity. Consequently, all the work I have made for many years has concerned itself with visual experience, its impact on consciousness, and its potential to transform consciousness. I have explored the potential for transformation of consciousness through visual experience via the creation of images that are neither representational nor interpretive -- images whose sole content is the act of seeing.

    Visual encounters form an essential core of our lives. In our increasingly media-saturated world we respond by creating "sight-bites," or instantly recognizable summary images having consensus meaning, with which we populate our personal visual codex of meaning. As we take in this fast-food like menu of predigested images, we increase the amount of what we take in, yet we decrease our engagement with each image. We simplify these images to their easiest read, sacrificing our joy of experiencing the complexity, multiple meanings, and the sensuousness of our visual encounters. Despite this, every visual experience impacts our consciousness in some way. I seek to rekindle the desire to experience sight-sensation, to become lost in the sensual act of seeing. Therefore, I do not consider my images as paintings in the strict sense, I consider them to be opportunities for "active seeing" and an exploration of the potential for sight-sensation to act as a catalyst in the convergence of sensate experience and the resulting transformational impact on consciousness.

    My creative methodology consists of developing images of increasing complexity, using layer upon layer of color, form, ambiguity, texture and detail, to create a multiplicity of overlapped motifs and cross-scale texture with organic overtones. Images are structured to have visual coherence, detail and texture at a viewing distance of a few inches to many feet. The cross-scale texture achieved through meticulous detail combined with natural lighting serves to circumvent the conventions of linear perspective, thereby altering the visual frame of reference for the viewer. Through this purposeful complexity and ambiguity I hope to compel the viewer to "see" into an image, drawing attention to their own experience of seeing, and to the possibilities of transformation of consciousness through intimate contact with our visual world. The work has evolved from single images into recombinant works comprised of multiple panels that viewers recombine to create desired visual experiences. They also create the titles to these works as they re-create them over time. This progression in physical complexity and structure serves to reinforce the act of seeing as the content of these images.

    In constructing the Viewingspace galleries, which contain images of my paintings, I attempted to make use of the current constraints of dreaded download times to reveal essential aspects of the work. I purposefully use the download times to reveal the nature of making the paintings through layering of color and form. As black and white images of details of the paintings download they are replaced by their full color counterparts. After this process concludes, you can then open the panels to view the entire painting, thus pealing back the layers of the paintings in an active and visual experience.

E-mail
symbolic_muse@acm.org