One could say we all create paintings as we distill meaning from the rush of life. Experiences, thoughts, moments, memories, and dreams mix together and overlap to bring understanding to our everyday life. My paintings echo this cognitive-emotional process. My artworks evolve through a series of painting sessions in which colors and images overlap, merge, and flow.
In antiquity and later during the Middle Ages, manuscript pages made from animal hides were often scraped down and used again. Faint traces of the underwritings on these parchments, called palimpsests, survived. My painting process involves a series of applications and erasures, as if to echo layered fragments from the past. At times, I scrape down entire wet paintings leaving a fragile palimpsest. At times, these under images bring forth mysterious fragments from my subconscious.
After an intense day of painting, I emerge from my studio often caught in a sort of trance. While words don’t come easily in these moments, images continue to resonate hauntingly throughout my body. These images, distilled in layers of time and vision, compel me to release their essence into the world.
Paintings are like pauses in the race of time. They call us to stop and breathe, and like Philip Levine, perhaps find a new rhythm, or even a poem.
As history rushes forward in the 21st century, communication via Skype, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr is almost instantaneous. Translations via Google allow us to speak across borders. And in an age of Wikileaks, international secrets are revealed to an audience of millions with the flick of a key. Family, pilgrimage and career sends many, myself included, on journeys to urban centers crisscrossing the globe. In our transient, changing, yet ever connected world, I see humanity’s fragility and celebrate its tensile strength.
In our own theaters of memory, the pulse, blur and vibrancy of our human experience reveals vital traces of who we are in a time that is simultaneously past and present, here and there, personal and global. Through these layered rhythms and songs comes a deepening sense of our urban selves.