The content of the paintings had always come from three essential sources: as derived from technical drawing for sculpture; the exploration of written pictographic languages/calligraphy and the synthesizing of these two entities. There have been times when the searching brush is in one moment attempting to define an imaginary street pattern and in the next write some unknown language; the structure of human endeavor and thought in graphic imprint. Usually done with a very wet brush in black over a white ground I allow the brush to figure out this supercharged dilemma on it’s own; an emotional interpretation of a written character or the place where an alley abuts a building? I imagine that I ought to be satisfied to not feel compelled to have to put a name to this process nor to intellectually dissect it. I am satisfied to function as the conduit for the energy; histories of humankind told through automatic writing as in the way poetry conveys the essence of experience. But as curiosity and investigation share the same importance as observation to the experimental artist it is fascinating to think about why, in the very simplest of terms, we do the things we do. At this time I was engaged in a dilemma concerning which direction to proceed in: Exclusively vertical or horizontal shapes or the combining of them both in a matrix. I chose not to decide and to allow the struggle, if it could, resolve itself. It has not. Consistent with my paintings content mirroring developments in sculpture the solely vertical or horizontal paintings were born during a period of intense production of horizontal/vertical wood sculpture. But complex as it might seem, as the tendency towards using parallel shapes in the sculpture to represent the natural world remained constant, their role in painting developed into an archetype I conversely began to see as metaphor for the structure of the built environment. By now the process of interchanging developments in sculpture and painting with one another had established itself as practice. And as the struggle between vertical and horizontal had become the essential dynamic in my vision the challenge had become a matter of deepening the exploration rather than merely sustaining the various series.

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11