There are two competing tendencies in my work.  One is observational and comes from engagement with the outside world, a concern with accurately capturing details and specifics.

The other addresses the interior, internal processes of seeing and reasoning, the unconscious or irrational, things that are hidden from view.  The works in this show can be divided into two groups that reflect those two approaches to working, but they bleed into each other. 

 

Nine of these paintings are based off of photos I took when I was last working in Egypt. in 2011.  Momentous events were occurring in the country that I was aware of but not directly in contact with.  The photographs I took were mundane, but showed revealing bits of the detritus of daily life in an ancient and modern city; optimistic posters for elections alongside the laundry hanging in an alley, the roof of a mud brick apartment building, a falafel stand seen through a car window.  They record history as seen by an outsider.  I never made paintings of Egypt until I realized likely I wouldn’t be going back.

 

The other paintings are my attempts to produce images of interior experience.  They draw on sources including personal and found photos but are abstracted in ways that elude literal mimesis or realism.  The landscapes are constructions that suggest impossible but desirable ideas of place; safety, heaven, or home.  The airplane is a secret that is static while always moving.  The eye is a watcher contained in the elaborate house of consciousness.   

 

I think of painting as a physical expression, communication channeled through a body and constrained by the limitations thereof; arm’s reach, squinting eyes.  It is the act of an animal smearing material around a surface.  A sheet of paper is always a mirror, it reflects the body acting on it.  The dichotomy of painting is that it encodes time, thought and the most ephemeral thing, the moment of looking, into the tactile materials of pigment, medium and support.  As such it is a perfect correlate to consciousness.  Emotion and sight put down in tactile pigment is like the elusive ghost that is consciousness emanating from and shaped by a specific corporeal existence.

 

September, 2017