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IN HIS OWN WORDS...
It is impossible to separate artistic consciousness from the emotional and
intellectual terrain of one's life experience. My formal education in spoken
languages, political science, and, finally, in medicine, fundamentally constructs
and delineates my artistic expression. For years my medical practice dealt exclusively
in the care of individuals with HIV and such experience in the tenacity of hope
and resilience of the human spirit give me an artistic vocabulary that is extraordinarily
personal and at the same time universal.
There is an obvious violence in the shattering of glass that cannot help but
provoke an emotional response in the observer no matter how familiar - or unfamiliar
- one may be with the narrative of modern art. Each of my pieces begins with
this elemental material and the force and chaos unleashed by this act of destruction
and acknowledgement. In the ensuing application of paint to the glass shards
and canvas, metamorphic healing occurs. Both surfaces, in this somewhat improbable
and non-intuitive pairing, allow an interplay of layers of colors with their
intrinsic qualities of varying hue, value, and intensity, that, for me, reflects
the incredibly nuanced emotional and physical interaction we recognize in our
own human experience.
The fusion of these two distinct processes - paint on canvas, paint on glass
- approach a type of kinetic sculpture as the eye appreciates the blending and
separation of colors and surfaces which occur with both movement of the observer's
position and that of illumination source. As in life itself, the viewer is left
observing the piece through a misleading separation of glass that is, in actuality,
part of the work itself and, indeed, provides no insularity. These works mirror
life in both a literal and figurative way: we may feel we are observing life,
but we are never so truly independent from the physical world that we are as
protected as we may imagine.
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