Eight years ago I started working with light and reflective materials, to take the spatial and color concerns of my painting into a different realm.  Light’s unique ability to touch both mind and feelings yields a sensation of depth, one that opens into mysterious worlds.

Light both beams into you and envelops you. These very special qualities let me build emotional spaces that resonate with memory and experience.  By amplifying and radiating color outward, into and around the viewer, I can build atmospheres, using color, line, and form in a way that goes beyond painting’s two-dimensional limitations.

My large installations originate with the architecture of the sites they will inhabit.  They are structural, concerned with the way that form, light, and reflected light merge to create a space that is artificial but not fictional: a stage set, lit from without and within.

In my small works, my hand is visible.  They have both spontaneity and hand-drawn lines, even though they’re made from industrial materials such as LEDs, electronics components, plastics, and wire.  Like painting, the work is deeply personal.

Painters have always talked about depicting light.  Today’s technology allows me to use light as medium as well as subject.  In this sense, I am bringing new media into the context of the history of painting.

 

December, 2011