Artist Statement:

Language Can be broken down to the granular form of Phonemes. . .the smallest units of sound that can carry meaning. Similarly, a visual glyph can represent a small unit of meaning that carries linguistic information.

Traditional meaning is an address for “being”, in the tradition of the self. For an artist to transcend the self, to not participate in an arena of personality-based art, the abstraction of reality-based experience and logical thought must integrate to form an internal meaning that resists representation and tradition. This is, for me, a poetic endeavor and is intrinsically tied to language and cognitive processes. This endeavor amounts to nothing less than educating the eye to see abstraction as thought-based reality.

Painting seems to live in a realm of pre-verbal translation of experiential meaning into gesture in order to communicate. In struggling with painting as a form with which to enter poetry itself, I have encountered a wall of concept that is difficult to traverse or destroy: The subjectivity of concepts inhibits representation of an external reality, and therefore any effort at determining a conceptual basis for poetically written paintings seems intrusive to the process of painting. This intrusion feels linguistic in nature. It seems that one must leave concepts behind in order to devote oneself to the unsayable.

In a modern environment of deconstructed form and content, painting remains an art of space. By slowing the image down, avoiding representation and form, by using language at its interpretive moment only, perhaps a true moment can still be located.