I am one of the lucky people that has no choice but to notice the world around me … not ALL of the world … the people of the world that are true of heart are noticeable … those that are mean-spirited and cruel will go unnoticed. But, it is what people have MADE that I notice the most … or even what nature has made – it is ALL part of our world. When you walk around there are amazing things to be seen, which excite the senses and the mind, conscious and unconscious – this is what I try to soak in, and this is what I try to bring to a sheet of paper – so that YOU can see it too.
Not quite that simple, of course. I tend to notice things that have “artistic merit” – whatever that is. To ME it is a relationship of textures, lines, shadows, spaces, bright areas, curves and edges that, graphically, make you interested – maybe they even make you feel good. From a distance, seeing these things revealed or emphasized on a piece of paper, shows you that something interesting is going on. Closer, you might see that underneath the visual impact is something more – some reality that is other than what you are used to thinking about. Maybe it is just the sand on a beach, but there are TWO different sands that mix in peculiar ways. Maybe it is a fence, made out of bamboo that was built by a person to contain some space, but it is not clear for what purpose – one can only speculate. Maybe it is a fence of chains hanging in the back of a truck filled with abandoned church pews. Maybe just some bricks on a wall, or some walls of a house, with the light from the sun and the shadow of something else impinging on these bricks in a complementary fashion. Maybe it is just someone’s window, with frilly lace curtains inside, but also reflecting the outside world in equal portions. Maybe it is the shiny steel convoluted surface of beer vats. Maybe it is a construction site where seven girders are all connected together at one point, poised against a bright white sky – showing the heavy rust texture characteristic of construction steel – but SEVEN?
It is the things that I see that most other people don’t even notice – that I seek to bring to people’s attention. That is why the theme of my work is “Visual Explorations of the Unseen”.