ART

People look for utility and meaning in forms and patterns- tools for survival, maps for navigation or sacred objects for communion. Our innate eagerness to anthropomorphize the world is driven by hunger and humanity, and proves fertile ground for my art.

I have sought, in two and three dimensions, to explore pareidolia, to tap into the lizard brain and bend someone’s visual or tactile stimulus towards a sticking-place in space and time. Inspired by anthropomorphic machinery, murmuring landscapes and the man-in-the-moon, I appeal to primal curiosities, attractions or repulsions for meaningful interpretations of our experiences.

While painting (Abstract Expressionist Oils on Canvas, 2001-Present) I seek to create layers of color and line to make them vie for the premium real estate of the viewer’s attention. There is an ongoing geology in Modernist color washes ranging from Arshile Gorky to Hassel Smith that become strata of mood and gesture for the audience’s visual excavation.

In the midst of these urban landscape, I scatter holes- mouths and eyes and chasms. But it has never felt enough to merely add a black dot and call it a hole a-la Bugs Bunny… I have always wanted holes to break space and plunge deeper into a material. Lee Bontecou’s mixed media voids or Andy Goldsworthy’s organic hollows yank you into a negative space, a holy void. It’s into that mystery where the trypopheliac in me wants to go!

More recent works in stone (Rocks, 2020-present) are inspired by pareidolia icons like the Makapansgat Pebble and neolithic fertility figurines. Whether an art object is repurposed or carved, when an artist still speaks with another artist across time, it is a terrific achievement. Time is a monster; I have watched my own paintings fade as colors and varnish darken and organics deteriorate. I am reminded of classical marble statues, and how the stonework remains priceless even as it has been stripped of its paint by fire or water. Some materials retain impressive weight and tactile power across the ages and I often hope my minimalist stone carvings outlast our civilization. 

The sprawling pocked rubble of Central Texas limestone is easy inspiration and leaves naturally occurring hagstones everywhere. This is a landscape filled with the holes representing geological and anthropological time: oil wells and pipelines and ancient bedrock mortar holes – or morteros– holes … as well as a whole bunch of displaced cheap aggregate.

In sharp contrast to the Jackson Pollock statement “I don’t use the accident – cause I deny the accident” my accidents are no longer gifts but gaffes! The cleaner a rock’s finish, the more successful it becomes. It is with this mix of shale, limestone, basalt, granite, quartzite, flourspar, marble, chert or flint I bore my projected eyes to inspire underlying biological response. Diamond-tipped drill bits allow me to rip through at a molecular level and leave behind the crisp hard circular edges that make those eye holes.

Maybe they’re lowbrow throwback gag gift meets pandemic boredom DIY trainwreck, maybe something more. They remind me of robots (don’t get me started) or the blobs from the Legend of Zelda, or I draw inspiration from abstract art, landscape but also want to help magical stones to keep people company… rocks that will listen! Kami-as-you-go. Good for offices, pockets, kitchens, aquariums and stocking stuffers.