Current work
ARTIST STATEMENT
When I first discovered the idea of a painting as a window, I was pulled in by what possibly existed beyond the window frame. Did the picture extend in all directions? If so, how far? By cropping a view of something larger, the picture frame, to me, suggested an infinite landscape. It’s that infinite landscape that has captivated my attention ever since — not because I am compelled to understand it, but rather because I cannot.
Even though I cannot understand it, I can still feel it — and it feels like a roller-coaster ride. When my feet are back on the ground, my engagement with infinity is an engagement with my own finiteness. My line can go only so far. My brushstroke can last only so long before it dies. Every action has to have a beginning, middle and end. My paintings, like my life, are finite within infinite surroundings.
In this process, I have arrived at a few approaches:
• I think of a painting not as scenes or pictures, but as a record, like a book or a musical score. As a result, the structure of my paintings is often a single Line that begins and ends on the canvas.
• The Lines consist of groups of parallel lines resembling barcodes. In Euclidean geometry, parallel lines are lines that never intersect, regardless of how far they extend.
• The Line is made up of segments, like paragraphs or parts of a sentence, with clear transitions from one to the next.
• I choose colors based on their vibration and impact on me, rather than on any reference to my visual environment. These colors are part of nature, but it’s a nature not limited to the Earth.
• Scaling up from small paintings to much larger ones provides an analogy to vaster scales and raises fractal geometry questions. What is the level of detail that I want to choose? I mine the seemingly microscopic details of my smaller paintings – as if they were nature itself – and try to reproduce them, a process that introduces new variations and accidents.
• My lines are an expression of my hand, body, nerves and heartbeat. Without the straight lines that would be provided by a ruler, waves and ripples appear and demand my engagement, linking my paintings conceptually to light, sound, gravitation, and the smallest scales of quantum fluctuations to the largest scales of cosmic structure.