| |
.Are
you using spray paint or airbrush to get those blurred spots and lines?
I use an airbrush. It allows for a very light touch (or maybe it is the
absence of touch) that one can't get from a spray paint or paintbrush.
.Blurry spray paint and hard edge masking; how did they come together?
The other day I overheard someone amusingly describe the masked lines
as being a binary code: yes no; on off, Using the two together creates
a rupture in the passage of the gaze over the surface. The eye sees one
type of space and then abruptly moves into another type. As the mind tries
to read the new type of space, there is a little gap or break. This is
where the meditation comes in.
.What brought about your interest in sculpture?
I wanted to see what it would be like if there were figures or objects
within the expansive color fields in the "A Welcome End to Knowing"
paintings. So I put these mound shapes and geometric shapes into the actual
paintings. It worked, but, as time went by I realized that I needed to
see them in 3 dimensions.
.Are some of the lines in the sculpture found twigs? Whatever
they are, they add an interesting effect. Are you playing with the conflation
of drawing and sculpture?
Yes, there are found twigs in many of the pieces. I have a big pile of
dried branches and twigs just outside my studio which I comb through to
find pieces of various thicknesses and shapes. In the sculpture I like
to explore 'the meeting of things'... architecture and nature, line and
space, and drawing and sculpture.
.Do you find that by using lines with differing qualities the
overall consideration becomes more about space/time?
Yes, the eye seems to move at different speeds across different types
of forms and lines. A curving, branch-like line may slow the movement
of perception whereas a straight, rectangular shape may be taken in more
quickly.
.Has making sculpture influenced your paintings, or vice versa?
The paintings feel more complete. I let each piece, whether it is a painting
or a sculpture, do its own thing.
.These new works seem especially quiet, almost whispering, or
as one viewer put it, humming. Do you see them as rather still and silent?
Have you always been after that quality?
I love hearing that... I have always been after that quality. Not just
silence, but with an oscillation or humming.
.How did you arrive at a rather noisy palette while maintaining
an overall silence or quiet?
This was pretty much always my preferred palette. I've come to see that
the colors I use communicate a vivid awakeness that is more like a lucid
dream than a waking perception of nature.
.Has meditation influenced your work?
I have been meditating much longer than I have been making sculpture or
paintings, so it's hard to imagine arriving at them without meditation.
What I have noticed is that I am comfortable with the experience of floating
in abstraction. Over the last few years it has become harder to distinguish
between the experiences of meditating, the act of painting, and the paintings
themselves.
.What about this sense of things floating, being airborne, hovering?
There is a hovering quality to my work both visually and inwardly. I think
this happens when the eye moves between one type of line or space to another.
For example, in many of the paintings the blurry shape seems to be simultaneously
floating in front of and behind the hard-edged space.
.Do you have an interest in graphic design, especially its aquarium
like shallow space, and decorativeness?
Yes, I like the almost flat, interlocking spaces in graphic design and
decorative patterns.
|