My art tends to focus on very conceptual themes of consciousness, humanity and life and the nature of our reality.  I like to experiment with different methods of production, including making wire frame or ribbon sculptures as reference material for my drawings.   Can vague concepts be made real enough to draw them?

I try to challenge myself with more and more complex designs that I seek to render into beautiful drawings that hide or suggest deeper meanings.   To this end, I employ a range of techniques of visual representation including graphite drawing, acrylic painting and paper and wire sculpture.   I am especially inspired by philosophers of mind and cognition like Daniel Dennett and the strange world of quantum physics.

I ask: how there can be meaning in a world governed by meaningless physical laws?

This interest originally (2000 to 2010?) influenced me to produce acrylic paintings quickly and with lots of expressive energy, relying on the natural flows and “controlled randomness” of the lucky interactions of liquid and gravity to determine the final images produced by the medium.

As I developed as an artist, I moved on from that expressive style to focus on many of the same themes of society, culture and consciousness by using more considered and constructed imagery, in particular employing a ribbon motif as a representational device.

I use a “ribbon” (or strip) motif in an ongoing series of drawings and paintings entitled “Entanglement”.  Symbolically, ribbons can be multiply meaning-ladened:  at once beautiful and fluid, conveying tension, connection and transition.

Ribbons are associated with positive situations (like gifts or awards) but also with dark and negative situations (like blindfolds, bindings, knots).  My key insight is that a ribbon-like visual element can be used artistically to represent the duality of nature that quantum physics tells us about.  Quantum physics tells us that we fundamentally do not (maybe “can not”) completely understand the universe:  Matter / energy can be understood as both wave and particle simultaneously and that two particles can be “entangled” in strange and confusing ways.

In another way, the ribbon is itself a metaphor for energy and the dynamic flow of changing and complicated situations.  This is fertile ground for future works!

I see my ribbon drawings as sitting somewhere between the planar frame of reference of a painting and the 3D volumetric space of sculpture.

There is no end and no beginning to each work of art: each work in the series is achieved with the same ribbon that conceptually unites all of the images into a continuous work which thereby challenges how we view individual works of art and suggests the connectivity between all things, even if apparently unrelated.