When I first discovered the idea of a painting as a window, I was pulled in by what would exist beyond the window frame. Did the picture extend in all directions? If so, how far? By cropping a view of something larger, the picture frame suggested an infinite landscape. That landscape has captivated my attention ever since — not because I’m compelled to understand it, but because I cannot.
It feels vertiginous. However, in my art practice, when my feet are back on the ground, engaging with infinity means engaging with my own finiteness. My line can go only so far, my brushstrokes can last only so long before they die, and every action has a beginning, middle and end. My paintings are finite within infinite surroundings.
The notion of infinity borders on an even more dizzying question – Why is there anything? My paintings provide a ready analog for that, too – the “ground” or “background.” Everything that happens in the painting happens there, but how do the brushstrokes relate to the ground? And how do both relate to my finiteness in an infinite environment?
In this process of engaging with the infinite landscape and the “why is there anything?” question, I’ve arrived at the following:
I think of a painting as a record, like writing or a musical score. Their structure is often a single path or line that “continues” off the canvas, or else it’s a set of layers, like chapters, creating a history reaching the moment of completion of the painting.
My brushstrokes are parallel lines like barcodes. In Euclidean geometry, parallel lines are lines that never intersect, even at infinity.
The brushstrokes form segments – like sentences or paragraphs – because the brush runs out of paint and must be reloaded. The segments force me to address the transitions, another analog.
When I scale up from small to large, the edges appear like coastlines but I’m forced to choose a finite level of detail and ignore the infinite fractal allusions.
See other Statements for each body of work.