I have always contended that my artwork is about relationships, the formal aspects of painting: color, light, composition, scale, etc. My problem has been that one could look at my work and discount all of that by solely focusing on the tangible - the person or the landscape or the object. I still work from life or photograph, but by abstracting and removing the representational aspect from the final product, I am forcing the viewer to enter my world and focus on what I deem to be important.
When I am painting, I am constantly doing and un-doing, shifting, changing, and dissecting. I can start a painting with an idea like, "I want this painting to be about orange and blue," but I don't know where the painting will go or what the finished product will be. The painting process does not go from A-Z; a painting takes twists and turns until it evolves into a completed visual statement.
The contrast of extension (ratios and percentages) is of most importance in my work because it embodies all formal aspects of painting: how much red to how much green, how much dark to how much light, how big to how small, how many soft edges compared to how many sharp edges, etc. Everything is intentional; even when a mistake is made, I must choose whether to fix it or leave it - sometimes a mistake is intentionally introduced as a catalyst.
These paintings are about color and how one color relates to another. I am fascinated by the shift from warm to cool colors, the change from saturation to neutrality, and the contrast of dark to light. I find pairing and grouping specific colors together to be very intriguing such as focusing on the primary colors, secondary colors, complimentary colors, or analogous colors.
These paintings are also about paint: how opaque to how transparent the paint is, how thick to how thin the paint is, how the paint is applied - by brush or by palette knife, and how the directionality of the paint guides your eye across the composition.
