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The paintings are an emotional response to a surrounding environment dominated by an ever accelerating rhythm of daily routine preoccupied with multitasking, texting, tweeting, and the like. With reference to the organic and the natural they stand in contrast to the endless distractions of an urban world entertained by technology and stiffened by the stylized, the computerized. They evoke an ongoing, mesmerizing state of contemplation and meditation that aims to captivate and hold the viewer in the experience of the moment where one is compelled to ponder and reflect. Their minimal earth-tone palette issues from subtle but otherwise lost details such as the texture of a one inch butterfly wing, a rust stain from a New York City street man-hole, a drop of glaze arrested on the surface of a Japanese tea bowl, the geological meanders of a rock from the Cevennes Mountains of southern France. It is the combination of these different textures, colors, and mark makings that captivates my interest. From nature to culture, from the kinetic and gestural to the static and controlled, from the light to the dark, I look to unite by dividing and to harmonize by setting up tensions.
The sculptures are worked in relation to the the paintings and vice versa. They originate from my collection of wood found on the forest floor during my hikes in Higashiyama mountain on the eastern side of Kyoto in Japan. As with my paintings, these wooden sculptures explore the possibilities of harmonizing such dichotomies as light versus dark, rough versus smooth, translucent versus opaque, as well as organic versus geometric. Using a similar approach to sculpture as with my paintings, I aim to forge a path between the two media where their echoing voices resonate some sort of connection, some sort of dialogue.