Figure Ground

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This is a fundamental concept in painting. It addresses the question of perception. How does the viewer see a two-dimensional surface? Color, shape, scale, density, and placement are among the ways a painting reveals its making. Since 2009, this concept has dominated my painting practice, not always successfully. But it is the visual game that led me to a spatial concept that felt adequate to match the shaky ground of this new century we live in.

Glass Flowers (2023—2024)

Fragments 12 (2019)

Meteora (2013)

Pink Remnant (2013)

Remnant 10 (2012)

Fragmentation

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The concept of fragmentation entertains to the notion of parts to the whole. If a puzzle arrives in pieces in a box it will take some figuring to assemble the picture in its totality. It's possible that connecting the parts is about how we form our sense of wholeness or completeness rather than recreating someone else's fiction. The landscape paintings made during graduate school in the late 70s are a glimpse into this idea. This concept runs across several bodies of work but lands in consciousness in 2006 with the large painting Yellow Brick Road and the subsequent Remnant paintings.

Big wind coming! (2020)

Broken Egg (2020)

Carnival (2020)

Chattoog (2020)

Fluttering (2020)