The Paintings and Constructions - View More Paintings and Constructions >>

When I was very young my mother took me to a press proofing for a printed product advertisement and I looked into the glass loop and saw all of the tiny dots that made up the solid colors. Traveling to downtown Chicago and looking up at all of the sides of the skyscrapers, the John Hancock Building, the Sear's Tower, and seeing all of those windows, each with its own unknown world going on inside. Carl Jung and the collective unconsciousness. Ant colonies. Digital pixilation. Remote viewing. Breaking a world down into its component parts and/or observing the big picture created from the connection of these parts. The Hindu concepts of the Atman and the Brahman. The interconnectedness of the universe. Slight variations on similar things. Neutrinos. The grid paintings, the biscuit fields, the crayon worlds, the wire tangles, the postage stamp collages, each composed of hundreds or thousands of similar elements, like the Atman, but creating an interconnected and interdependent whole much greater than the sum of its parts.

I use materials outside of their normal context. These materials are used and arranged in ways that they were never intended. They are identical or very similar items that can be accumulated and assembled in large numbers but have, or can be made to have slight variations, or imperfections. Resin, like liquid glass, helps to create and hold together the interconnection of the individual elements and at the same time heightens and helps to clarify and define the qualities of the individual elements.

One at a time construction, with great repetition, time consuming, slight variation upon close inspection, basic, slowly building-up something from one original action, element and gesture, repeated thousands of times, a meditation, extreme focus on inward state of mind through repetitive outward activity, creating a new thing by destroying, altering, rearranging, or misusing another thing.

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The Collages - View More Collages >>

It is overcast and chilly and it looks like it will rain any minute now so the isolated beach is deserted except for us. Missouri, my dog, runs the entire length of the small beach and then back again to where I am standing. It rained last night and I can tell by the wet and smooth sand that we are the first ones here this morning. Missouri is off again, down the length of the beach at her old age full speed, and at the very end she dips briefly into the water, biting the lake with her smiling mouth and swallowing and then biting and spitting out the cold water. I call to her and tell her that she is the fastest little girl on the beach. She responds with a proud smile and then a water belch. She is starting to make her way back to me at a slow trot and I squint my eyes. Things around me become simple and clear; the arrangement of the sand and the rocks and the water and the trees and the sky, each forming bands, layers and slices in the simplified and flattened space my narrowed eyes create. Later at my studio, the acrylic monoprints and ongoing collection of various ephemera merge with these memories and other thoughts as I print, cut, arrange, rearrange, layer and paste the small 4.75 inch by 4.75 inch worlds into existence.

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