White Paintings 2003 / 2007

Figures immersed in invented surroundings composed of blister packs, the ocean of plastic we live in. Lush whites, piercing black line, surfaces in relief loosely describes this series.

Purity

These paintings are about purity and pure states of consciousness. They are conceptually driven towards beautiful ends. They are about capturing an essence, an instant depicted in space, vastness, color used as one saturating emotion and not anecdotally descriptive, a symphony of whites, lush paint, lean paint, glossy, matte, they are pared down to essentials, symbolic yet particular. They are about varying qualities of time – the immediacy of mark-making, the geological wait for thick oil paint to dry, a breath, the time of a wave. They are about the contrasting nature of the evolved and built worlds. They are about people engaged in metaphorically charged simple activities – drawing in the air, painting with a broom. They are about something new and something classic and commonplace – standing, meditating, reading.

And they are mostly white, the white of clear eyes, positivity, lightness, truth, an abstraction held at a distance from cause and effect. The use of white(s) aims to eliminate all things extraneous, to make nothingness substantive. White is like light shining through these times of darkness.

The panels with elements in relief explore the hidden architecture in arrangements of blister packs - the injection molded plastic protective invisible packaging we toss out when opening a new toy, a pill, an acupuncture needle, almost anything portable that will then exist in landfill for millennia forever announcing our moment of purchase, conveyance and consumption.

This repurposed flotsam of consumerism creates complex spaces more suggestive of our collective corruptibility than purity. The blister pack panels have high associative value - contemporary totems, urban aerial views, chromosomal maps, circuit boards, mandalas – and act, in part, as a sort of coded identity for the figures.

The figures in my work anchor my leaning towards the conceptual and emotive. A linear depiction at once cuts to the soul, and is abstract. Surrounding the figures is a subtle corona quietly radiating its physical presence. The scale and lush, varied, nuanced surface of these pieces heightens their impact.

The work is about oneness and contrasts: the moment vs. the eternal, the juxtaposition of thin layers of matte paint with buttery layers of glossy paint, figuration in counterpoint to abstraction, the literal in relation to the poetic. The white unifies while materials clash. These stark opposites yield a profound energy – one enhances and defines the other, much like the life force tension graphically revealed by the Chinese yin/yang symbol. 

Diptychs are a natural environment for this conceptual backdrop where two contrasting entities form one whole, like an open book. Symmetrical and asymmetrical triptychs add to this sense of revelation.

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