As a painter I have grown to realize that the visual vocabulary lies somewhere between an organic and geometric depiction. These two fundamental aspects of visual communication, recognizable through symbols and iconic metaphors, help me to comprehend our world of opposites. The resulting subject gains meaning and promotes insight. This in turn helps to reveal our place in the universe and the nature of reality.

With my paintings, I document the act of conscious dreaming. The subconscious reality promotes instinctual tendencies that develop in a composition becoming physical and manifest in the painting. Through the painting process I reflect the social, cultural and earthly influences of my individual environment. It is how I see and interpret the world I am in.

Although my painting is an individual experience, our collective, civilized human experience accumulates throughout human history and into this present moment. I see my painting process in this continuum rather than at an isolated instant. It is this continuity that I hope to convey in the results of my work.

With every passing decade, the multi-dimensional state of our reality becomes clearer as physicists, theoretical physicists, astronomers, and many other scientists help us unfold and comprehend our universe. Collectively, we recognize that within its first second, our universe expanded to half its current size and has expanded to roughly 14 billion light years wide in all the time since that first instant. Many experts pool their efforts to derive the space/time models in order to describe our universe. As we build upon the work of those that came before, the picture of our universe becomes clearer as time passes.

One aspect the science reveals is that time and space at our scale retains fingerprints of this initial “singularity” crossing the threshold from before space/time existed into our earthly time frame. This very realization is where science becomes spiritual through philosophy, and the definition of the human condition grows proportionally. As our scientific understanding expands, so does our internal connection to the vast universe we belong to.

I am a painter, not a physicist, but I wish to address these understandings brought about with scientific discoveries as subjects in my work. Within the two-dimensional context of painting I reflect on these current universal realizations by exploring a multi-dimensionality in my work.

The fabric of a painting with all of its detailed interwoven threads is a visual sequence that acts as a metaphor to the fabric of time and space, also becoming the substrate for a diverse landscape of characters. This puts the textile element of a painting in a dialogue with the subjects on the surface. In this context the textile of a painting is a vehicle that assists in revealing these hidden subjects, helping them surface into our physical reality.

The glue sizing application of the textile permits the raw appearance of the fabric to be revealed in the finished painting. I see this as a means to examine the inner workings of a painting, revealing the creative process as well as the result. This sculptural aspect of the textile is left prominent, portraying the sequence of the painting’s development, freezing a gestural dialogue of moments as they unfold and record the passage of time.

The shape of the painting is not necessarily random. I define the shape of a stretcher with linen or burlap and these choices portray a personality and sensibility in the initial stages of making the painting – even before the graphic composition begins. The resulting three dimensionality of the work extends beyond the implied two dimensions of a standard ninety degree canvas.

Utilizing the dichotomy of the pairs of conventional opposites – vertical and horizontal, perfect and imperfect, crooked and square, symmetry vs. asymmetry and so on – I transcribe the geometry of our consciousness. This geometry helps me describe and portray imperfections I feel mirror our civilized attempt. A visual document that embraces the magnitude of our ignorance in an accessible way, and permits the communication of current ideas in an emotional context without the guise of perfection.

As it is seen in the spectrum of metaphors around us, the subject is displayed in the Now while the emotional response bridges to other periods in human history.

“Nature is how math feels” –Brian Green–