At a young age, working in a gallery, studying and selling late 19th and early 20th century American and French masters, after sitting day after day, mostly in the empty gallery, I was deeply affected one morning noticing the sun's glare bleach out most of the works in the gallery from my position seated at the desk. Revealed was every picture in uniform reflection of light, some riddled with impasto, inconsistencies of paint, matte vs gloss laid bare, the stark truth of objects, their subject matter washed out beyond recognition. This ignited my curiosity in what else a picture could be... Why had these works suddenly become so sculptural simply because it was an earlier time of day? I was new to this way of thinking and thus began my interest in the trajectory of modernism. Understanding art movements and isms, post 1900 perfectly primed me for a deep interest in today's hyper-saturated picture environment and its increasing dependency on digital communication as a vehicle to serve the habit-forming addiction to relevancy.
Originally, I experimented with my computer and a desktop printer, eventually expanding to a large format printer and then integrating desktop scanners. I wanted to record a new type of action-painting. One in which the computer, coupled with the scanner, interpreted and recorded my marks. When Pollock let the paint drip from his brush, there was an element of blind trust that an original picture could be created without the artist’s touch. I was interested in exaggerating the distance between touch and surface, like the way a mouse moves a cursor. I decided that a scanner could record not only marks separated from a surface but also record the movement of my hand as a part of the mark-making. “Scanner Pastel 2 (Ball Point Blue), 2015” depicts a scanner recorded pastel drawing. While the scanner light raked the glass surface of the scanner bed, I hurriedly made impressions with a pastel. The pastel marks are easily recognizable, while the blurred zags and zigs are my hands in motion. “Scanner Pastel 2” is silk-screened onto the reverse side of a 34 x 26 piece of glass, sealed in enamel, the art inseparable from the protective glass. Picasso’s light drawings served as motivation for this way of thinking.
The path I had discovered using the scanner-bed quickly developed into experiments in mark-making including using the canvas itself as “brush”. Small pieces of duck cotton canvas were cut-up and frayed (brush-like), drawn upon with bold gestures from a sharpie, and then dragged over scanner bed while the computer recorded the motion. In addition to depicting time (as does a photograph) ... depicting canvas, itself, had also become a prominent focus of my work. The complications of an idea of canvas pictured on canvas seemed fitting for our content-curated, avatar-creating, soap-box reality found in social media.
Theoretically, “Canvas Scan I, 2015 had been a success. However, I grew increasingly challenged by the work’s final step of realization, the printing of the art from computer onto canvas. Printing with ink seemed cheap, precarious, way too light sensitive, too abundant, too easily replicable, and honestly an already heralded discovery at that time by Wade Guyton, whose inkjet iterations I have watched with admiration, throughout his career. I became more fascinated with paint, specifically paint on canvas. I wanted this last step of materialization of a computer work to return to paint, to complete the dialog that it started.
I had a growing interest in how a computer-housed drawing could output as paint on canvas without using an inkjet printer. I decided to simplify this search by focusing on the overlooked binary components of the painting: 1) the canvas, aka the “support” and 2) the “ground”, even layers of white gesso applied on top of the canvas. This is the foundation of most paintings. Typically, three layers of gesso (or “ground”) are applied to canvas, so the artist can then create their picture, commonly referred to as the “figure”. I immediately became fascinated by the gesso-canvas or “ground” and “support” relationship. For starters, I saw a poetic correlation to binary computer code (1, 0 or on, off) that could symbolically charge the painting. In addition, I quickly realized that inkjet printers could not print white, (or at least none that I know of at this time of writing). Inkjet printers are dependent on the white of the paper. If I wanted to print white on unprimed linen or duck canvas using an inkjet printer, I could not. This impossibility encouraged further tightening of my art technique against common printing technologies. Experimentation would follow, figuring out exactly how to transfer the computer image into paint on canvas. “Embassy III, 2020” is an example of the refinement of my technique.
The MSN butterfly had started to become a recurring character in my work at the time. Friendly-looking and for the most part indistinguishable from the myriads of butterfly cartoons or logos circulating, this smooth sentinel was my technology representative. Advanced computing exposes one, often sneakily, to a world of trappings, of sophisticated observers, operating in the coded inverse, seemingly behind the screens. I likened the thin layer of the computer screen to the layer of gesso with the butterfly illustrating movement within; the butterfly representing data seeking, the code, the cookie, the user’s cache, etc. “August, 2020” depicts a seemingly innocent scout patrolling the flower garden, the icon’s body defined by an inversion of the flower photograph, a slick sliver.
“Window, 2021” elaborates more directly upon my computer/canvas metaphor. The Microsoft Windows logo doubles as depiction of the stretcher bars that support the canvas, exposing the underworking of the painting. This work is a subtle nod to the minimalist work of Frank Stella whose broad bands of paint inwardly echo their confining dimensions.
Upon completion of “Window, 2021” , similarities between the pixel and the textile weave of warp and weft started to become more apparent. The tapestry is a rich visual language, historically preceding painting in popularity. Le Corbusier once called tapestries "nomadic murals". Treasured for their portability, richness in color, and narrative, tapestry and textile in general is our common language. Threads not only make our history visible, but they also hold together our books and clothes. Today, they also hold together our arguments. “Threads” are commonly used in social media to communicate large amounts of information, efficiently. The grid-dependent images of the past and present are heavily responsible for holding together our idea of the fabric of reality.
With the basics of my language in place, I decided it was time to push this new aesthetic agenda. I realized through a side-project that I could use the computer to explore color. With my “Tie-Dye-Camo” project (tiedyecamo.io) I embarked on an aggressive color exploration. I wrote lines of code designed to select colors and return tens of thousands of color interactions, for review and refinement, an undertaking I thought would intrigue Seurat and Albers, maybe even impress them. My color “palette” included many colors mostly taken from standards charts such as the Federal Standard 595 Colors, as well as Crayola, among others. Reviewing color at such a rapid rate did not make things easier. It was simply a tool to speed things up. Refining thousands of color-iterations took weeks of commitment, but the results were breath-taking when they finally emerged. At the end I was left with an NFT project cataloging all 2023 works on the Tezos blockchain.
My code experiments with Tie-Dye-Camo opened my mind to the possibility of carefully guiding code; using code as a painter layers paint to discover the unexpected. I don’t think that I could ever have imagined results as found in “Tie-Dye-Camo 0151” with twelve colors in abstract harmony. Since I could rapidly study and review color interactions using code, I thought that maybe I could review interactions of subject matter by also writing lines of specialized code.
With “RESCAN 1, 2023” I had discovered the input requirements of subject matter for my code concept and a new fascination for depicting transparency by embracing negation. I wanted to push this idea further. In “RESCAN 2, 2024” I was able to more successfully exaggerate the idea of a drawing seemingly behind the now foregrounded raw and barren linen canvas. The “ground” (black and white gesso) is convincingly depicted as behind the “support” of the “canvas”. This work is dependent on the surface negation from which it originated. The scanner, the computer, the code, these are all things that happen in digital space, “behind” the screen. Remnants of this space carry through. The abyss-like edges of the scanner itself are depicted in the on and off black-outlined perimeter, the photographic quality of scanned canvas threads create the illusion of invisible paint-play, the fray signals a predetermined gesture of canvas as brush, all while the marks remain indistinguishable from motion.
Inspiration for “RESCAN 2, 2024” can be found in my beloved book of Navajo textiles. Striking similarities of how treads push and pull, as well as overlaps to scanner line-breaks can be found in a child’s Blanket. I was thrilled to have unexpectedly discovered this book after researching the interior tapestries of Stanley Kubrick’s film “The Shining” and eerily shocked to see correlations to my earlier work. Clyfford Still’s late works from the 1960s and 70s are constantly on my mind. We share the same fascination of light emanating through the surface.
My work continues into 2025 with “fEr, 2025”, which displays a new pixel frequency that I recently found for myself. Rather than the traditional square pixel as seen in “Window 2021,” or the sun-deprived “Night Flowers, 2024”, this new interpretation helps further illustrate my tapestry thread metaphor with pixels that are more rectangular and curved in appearance when in proximity to one another. In “fEr, 2025,” canvas weave is subject matter. These marks, sentimentally aligned with the simplicity of Philip Guston’s charcoal drawings, look more like stitches, pixel as stitch... abstracted fragments, open to interpretation as found in the simple pleasure of looking at clouds; a traffic of confused emoticons, loosely: cloud-computing.