....I’ve recently begun to think about how this way of making paintings is related to childhood memories I have of playing with dollhouses. As a youngster, I spent hundreds if not thousands of hours holding, touching, and looking at miniature versions of furniture. I would obsessively arrange and rearrange furniture and interiors used to replicate much larger versions of “the real thing”. So, in a way, this “play memory” is beginning to navigate and inform my painting process. When I step back and look at paintings that are finished (the good ones, that is), I sometimes sense a quiet, mysterious, slightly magical quality of a secret life of an interior; one completely void of people but alive nonetheless.
I am interested in limits, specifically, in their ability to generate surprise, even freedom. These limits need not be elaborate, or even obviously visible; in fact, it is often the most humble and self-evident limits, which, over time, build bizarre chandeliers of glimmering crystal, guide the catacomb construction of ant colonies, or shape the swoop of flocks and tidal currants with eerie similarity. Awareness of these limits does not guarantee predictive power, or the ennui of omniscience.
This is good, and fascinating.
And it is through this means that I make my work: every piece is the manifestation of a predetermined scheme – a system of small limits, with clear a beginning and end. These scripted pieces of visual choreography are allowed to accrue to show me their beauties and surprises, allowing discovery in the midst of certainty. Which, in the end, is a satisfying contradiction – a tension of philosophical forces hospitable to directed freedom and consistent astonishment.
good and fascinating...see more here.
