I came of age in the era of post-painterly abstraction. Artists like Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, and so many others of that period were primary shapers of my aesthetic vocabulary. Jasper Johns, too, remains high on the list of early influences, though his work has always resisted labels. But this is where my earliest visual awareness of art as a living thing was born—from this artistic sensibility which embraced flatness as a cardinal virtue, banishing both dense painterly surfaces and any suggestion of depth or imagery.
My project, conversely, has been to banish both imagery and flatness, arriving at something like a hybrid of painting and sculpture. These are not precisely paintings, in the usual sense, but they are also not exactly not paintings, either.
The current series of wall sculptures, roundish and concave, begins with the underlying sculptural form, made of plaster over a wire mesh armature, in shapes that may suggest, in a non-specific way, a variety of organic sources.
Beyond the sculptural form, the built-up surface texture—accreted with dozens, and often hundreds, of layers of vibrantly colored encaustic—offers me almost endless possibility for discovery—variations of color, texture, layering, intensity, luminosity, and character.
This simultaneous buildup of texture and layered color allows me to investigate ways of producing a richer, more complex visual experience, one which fully reveals itself only on closer inspection. It takes time to decipher the layers of buried, partially concealed, partially exposed color, just as getting to know a complex individual, or exploring the layered depths of one's own psyche might. At the same time, it bears the strong suggestion of something hidden beneath the surface.
One of the things I see reflected in the work today is something that I can read as a queer sensibility. What I mean by that is that there is something distinctly peculiar, something of an outsider nature in the work, in its awkwardness, in its imperfect, misshapen, hand-made lumpiness, in its overall oddness.
Beyond any self-referential aspects of the work. I also remain fascinated with the emotional impact of color, and the ways form can alter or amplify its affect, which I have been exploring for a decade or more.