Murmuration
While traveling in southwestern United States, I had the amazing good luck to witness the hypnotic natural phenomenon known as murmuration. This occurs when starlings (to confuse predicators), move as a single unified organism, asserting themselves against the sky and creating a spectacular visual expression. Within the swarm, shapes and contours emerge, bringing to life physical abstractions. Shifting levels near and far occur simultaneously with stunning displays that range from meditative to highly dramatic, changing in an endless flux. Geometric to organic, to fluid, to ethereal-- from reality to a dream--my intention, with this painting was to capture a moment and make visual a fragment of that experience.
Through The Mirror To The Door
In the months that passed after February 2021, I was coming to terms with the complexity and simplicity of isolation by building my own description of the pandemic— a visual response to a fantastic new reality. Sorting through ambiguity, deciphering unclear information, absorbing the shifting boundaries and overlapping demands of global disruption— and to witness, all around me, slow time-- unmatched by lasting emptiness. The virus, both real and imagined, described with images and opinions, was everywhere and nowhere. A cellular likeness of menacing beauty, simultaneously delicate, precarious, vast and pernicious. I returned to a childhood fascination of standing between two mirrors, creating the limitless reproduction of an image within itself -- as an infinitely recurring sequence. For me this was a metaphor of almost unbearable tension--reproducing image within image -- fooling the eye with an ambivalent relationship of closeness and distance and chasing infinity to the door at the end of light.
Conversation
In a busy world of reds, blues, neutrals and black, this stone lithograph print is an abstract image of two figures engaged with each other in a scrappy exchange. The background texture of careful, regular pattern is a blind embossment made with an acid etched zinc plate. The imagery is intended to be both literal and abstract, so familiar graphic details function formally, while providing little shocks of recognition. Color, like confetti from discarded prints and paintings, fit together as puzzle pieces to build action and enliven the broken surface. Color also holds the imagery together, while visually allowing for the possibility it might break apart and rearrange at any moment. The edition of 10 is printed on Rives BFK cotton paper, 5 on cream white, and 5 on gray paper. There are four printer proofs included in the edition.
Puff Piece
From time to time, I re-examine my interest in the seductive pull of nature through the language of flowers. Color, pattern plus paper manipulation form the abstracted images in this series (produced using the combined techniques of stone lithography, zinc plate etching, carved rubber stamps, colored inks) to explore the subversive power of a classic motif.