"Clearing" 12 x 54" oil

"Long Shadow Blues" 18 x 40" oil

"Chiasmas" 10 x 12" oil

"Chiasmas" 22 x 22"

"Blue Dawn" 34 x 34" oil

"Garden Rotunda" 23.5 x 68" oil

"Nocturn/ Lake "
40 x 54 oil

Initially interested in Nietsche’s use of the term augenblick (the blink of an eye), I became intrigued by the idea that each moment could be either an abyss or an opening or clearing. As vision and experience are intimately connected to time, these thoughts related to Bergson’s writings regarding experience, time and memory and his early critique of cinema. Also of interest was Heidegger’s notion of the darkening of the world through enframing and this, as well as the idea of the augenblick, led to consider- ations of how authentic any vision or experience might be at any moment.

The Buddhist belief that human beings, for the most part, experience only the illusory veils of ignorance and conceptual dualities that obscure true reality has been a constant consideration in regard to these other musings.

The obvious visual metaphor for these considerations seemed to be a moment of stopped technological time or a moment enframed in film and I began (in 1997) to paint black and white images which replicated the look of stop-action film stills. In these Glance paintings, I hoped to create images in which an optical illusion would create a sense of the images still moving. The idea of a glance, as indicative on intuitive, spontaneous duration, is contrasted against the ‘gaze,’ a term much used these days in cultural dialogues, and indicative of the hegemony of a mechanized vision. In my opinion, which has been reinforced by my experiences in teaching drawing and painting, most people gaze at the world only in isolated moments and more often experience the world at large as something of a blur.

In the Glance series, I tried to enhance the metaphor of the moment/abyss through the isolation of the figures which themselves can be seen as almost black holes and hoped also to evoke the ideas about darkening (skotos) and blind spots (scotoma). My sustained interest in the actual production of these paintings, both technically and metaphorically, was reduced to considerations of darkness and light which seemed appropriate to the discipline of painting.

By way of a contrast which was always intended, recent paintings have focused more on light than darkness and on light as the vehicle for color and symbolic, in a sense, of an opening toward life. Rather than dwelling on an abyss, I hoped to consider what Heidegger called the lichtung (the lighting - the clearing) in a series on paintings of semi-abstracted forest interiors.

Still enframed in a cinematographic moment, the recent color paintings are meant to provide both a revealing of the small miracle of light and an impression of phenomenal experience itself. At the simplest level, the images in the most recent paintings are meant to be like the backgrounds in films - like a ghost world, there but almost unnoticed - where focus, solidity and depth of field are eroded within an ongoing and purely qualitative continuity. I want the image to represent an obvious physical phenomenon but also an invisible phenomenon - a memory or sense of deja vu. Most importantly, the ‘reality’ of the images is always in question.