Artist Statement
I did not always see myself as an artist. My first passion was science, which led to my brief study of gemology and a full time job at the Gemological Institute of America. If I had not been cursed by nightmarish visions of beauty speaking to me through the stones that I spent hours examining under a microscope in the dark, my life may have been safer and more linear. The shadows and light of another world, growing like an invisible mold at the periphery of my physical eye, soon became so suffocating that I needed to paint the relentless forces out of me. Making art was an act of self-exorcism, a way to survive.
The crystal, the transparent veil, the luminescent molecular growth, and other recurring features in the world of my paintings, correspond to the world found under the microscope, but this is not where I derive them from. My imagery is dredged from the miasmic realm of beauty and horror that is just a few miles deeper than dreams, in the Chthonic realm, where an invisible presence speaks to me, showing me motion pictures from deep time.
My process begins with delicate underpaintings of chaos. Drips, splashes, smears of paint, saliva, coffee, wine, ink and other materials, are the first to appear on the surface of my canvases. On these indeterminate marks I gaze in mediation in order to summon the imagery of my work. Over the underpainting I gradually build transparent layers of oil paint until more solid, luminescent forms begin to emerge. The crystal eyes, vegetal forms, and soft geometry that come from my visions are the representations of things unseen, the invisible forces in nature, the mind, or the ether.
