My work combines painting, darkroom techniques, and traditional printmaking. It begins by creating organic patterns on photographic film. The images are composed and nurtured through a controlled process of delivering concentrated photochemicals directly to film emulsion, allowing chaotically derived patterns to occur. The images are cultivated, frozen, then transferred to a polymer photogravure plate where they are hand-inked and printed in the traditional manner, on an intaglio press. By inking every plate by hand and taking detailed notes on the individual approach for each piece, I create editions of artwork where each piece is essentially the same in terms of color and composition, but with subtle differences that make each piece one of a kind. The work is slightly variable in its execution, but each edition is limited in number.
My work is developed in pursuit of giving shape and form to natural images that come out of the subconscious. It is about getting back to the universal, primal imagery. It is about the things we see in the dark, when there is no light and acute senses and self-awareness, represented by pure color, and projected by the mind onto the eyelids or onto the consciousness. The imagery is about forms coming from nature and the mind when it is in a hyper-aware, empathetic state able to make broad but qualitative connections between ideas and sensations such as color and sound, touch and taste, and logic and emotion. It represents the feeling and imagery that comes just as we are falling to sleep -- then awakening again briefly to realize we are not yet dreaming -- or the seconds after awakening from a long sleep, when we are straddling the realms between being fully aware of the external world and still strongly connected to our subconscious being, where a lucid awareness associated with people, events, and things is felt and seen as one experience in the form of color and natural forms.
I began working in this manner as the result of experiments painting on motion picture film in the style of abstract expressionists, such as filmmaker Stan Brakhage who I met in 1994 and learned from periodically until his passing in 2003. These experiments, informed by this school of thought in abstract expressionsim, and drawing from the rich history of experimental painters, photographers, and filmmakers, eventually gave way to the still images that have become central to the body of work.
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