Everything in Place

My work is concerned with subtle changes in color, which intensify a sense of light and open space. It takes many see-through layers to build the luminosity in these paintings, and the process continues to fascinate me. I like the calm that envelops me when I paint color over color, in only vertical and horizontal brush-strokes. Daylight increases the viewer’s ability to see these translucent color layers and the wood grain. It adds to the luminosity and mutability of these works, creating a quiet dialogue of shifting color, shifting space.

Wood is preferable to canvas because the smooth hard surface has no actual texture, allowing the marks I make to contribute to the structure of the work. Since the color layers are transparent, the viewer is able to look through them to the wood grain, a more intimate interaction and a contradiction to the sense of object integral to three-dimensional boxes and industrial plywood.

I try to use salvageable plywood. The wood grain, clearly unique to each painting, is becoming a major contributor to the final surface layering. Perhaps it is my ecological concerns, a kind of reverence, or a desire to create a new way of seeing what was once a tree, that makes this happen.

Ultimately, it is the formality of the paintings that holds everything in place.