ABSTRACTION

These abstract paintings and drawings have been evolving over the past two years from my own imperative to abandon the tangible object as reference, and the intellect as critic. Rather, I am responding with each new mark or colour on the canvas to those which have come before. What starts randomly turns deliberate.

The paintings all seem to contain the rounded square, as figure and/or window, singly or in masses. In some paintings they succumb to gravity; in some they repel or attract each other as magnets. What intrigues me is their engagement with each other, and their energy in space. They can appear as webs or primordial soups, bubbles or views of the ground from high above. The imagery is, in fact, what the viewer makes of it, and I feel the work succeeds only when it becomes a dialogue.

"What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements."

-Marc Chagall