Cloud-Thinking

In 'Cloud-Thinking', as in much of my painting, a thinking-through paint is played out in its gathered elements. I’m interested in the way paint, placed and manipulated on a surface, can create a poetic subjective experience; where viewers may find themselves caught between the painting’s substance or facture, and its illusions. Vistas open inward as the surface gives way to an invented space with its own narrative. While paint may be spilled, dripped, pushed, scraped, folded, pressed or blown, following the logic of its own internal laws, it is encouraged to coalesce into some kind of concentrated image. The work seems to hover just the other side of abstract, flirting at the boundaries of figuration. Natural fractals, helices, waves, cones, and spirals form like the outer life of plants or the interiors of creatures. Yet, while nature seems to emerge, these forms find familiar referents and borrowings from the ornaments, designs and graphic codes of art history. In this way the paint is allowed to become more than itself: to engage the imagination, or it may simply collapse back into itself.