Night and Day Dreaming 

“Love, in its essence, is spiritual fire.” – Emanuel Swedenborg 

This show of new paintings combines themes that I’ve been working on for many  years including abstracted landscapes, watery environments and dreamscapes. This  work is painted in oil on paper or wood panel and includes individual as well as  modular paintings. 

Recently, I have come to understand that making my work is how I love the world. At  every step of my process, I have opportunities to synthesize memories of color, place,  and lucid dreams, all filtered through a growing sense of emotion. 

There is a sensational passion, a spiritual fire, that burns beneath and behind the  making of, and looking at, visual art. My studio is the place where I feel most myself,  and I look forward to entering it as a space where the rules of the outside world don’t  apply and the images in my mind can be made visible while I’m safely ensconced.  This is where I can explore the spiritual qualities and interconnection of the internal  and external worlds that I inhabit. 

The “Swamp” paintings are based on my experience observing consecutive sunrises  in the swamp as an artist in residence and represent a promise of hope as moments  in the progression of the auroral environment from darkness through to bright  daylight. By using paint with thick impasto, the physicality of mark-making becomes a  material record, capturing motion and reflections in water. 

Shortly after returning to the US from living in Berlin, Germany, I participated in an  artist’s residency in Mississippi, and all of a sudden, the spectacle of the swamp  before me as a sensuous watery environment where I observed sunrise after sunrise  from the lake’s surface, seduced me as if I had become part of the sunrise itself. There  was an ecstasy to this place, and a unification of interests I had been exploring for a  long time: auroral and crepuscular light, qualities of water, mirror-imagery, reflection,  pattern, ambiguous forms, and the sequential and progressive qualities of  experiencing a prismatic environment through time. There was an awareness at all  times of things not being solid, of possibility and potential pulsating beneath  surfaces. Now with this environment as an armature, I deepened the project into an  extensive and ongoing investigation into abstraction.

As grouped installations, they become a tapestry of recorded time, a map or calendar  representing different stages within one sunrise, or moments from many sunrises  brought together, an accumulation of sunrises on bodies of water witnessed over my  lifetime thus far. As individual paintings they speak to a particular moment of color  and light in the landscape. I see landscape as a metaphor that possesses a  mesmerizing yet impenetrable mystery. 

The “Cloud Machine, Dream Machine” paintings were inspired by recent waking  dreams, as a meditation on the transmutation of matter and energy from one state to  another. The imagery for these paintings came to me as moving visions, like  animations, in lucid dreams where light transformed into leaf-like shapes that  generated clouds, and in other dreams, visions of the sky at sunset encircled by  vignettes of organic abstraction. It’s amazing to me that this kind of subconscious  conjuring can have so much poignancy and power while its direct genesis remains  inexplicable.