Artists' Statment - Nothing is Forever or Even Close
The natural world is a storm of forces and phenomena, compounded and accelerated by the activities of people. Everything changes all the time, at once beautiful and sublime, horrible and cataclysmic.
These paintings are not of nature and they don’t display nature. They pry open the area between the natural and the un-natural. Non-representational painting gone slightly representational, they are trying to extend the range of meaning of abstract painting.
The photographs embedded in the paintings represent a particular time and place in the natural landscape. I collide them with areas of color, of paint, of "painting", I test their significations by plunging them into abstraction. I build a kind of (un)balance, and allow it to not read as a unified composition. The parts stay apart in a kind of off-balance coexistence.
The image is altered, changed, obstructed, and hidden by paint. The specific real representation is propelled towards an expanded perhaps mythological meaning. States of being are changed and re-ordered in the visual. It usually tends towards hot and bright.
This is an attempt to open up meaning, about the subject matter and about painting. Behind all specific meanings is the specter of unknowing, the incompleteness of knowing, the mystery that remains beyond the limits of the known.
These paintings are my attempt to bring some of that into view.
