SHADOW TRACKING
Jack Fischer Gallery
San Francisco, CA
May 6th - June 10th, 2023
Shadow Tracking is my largest painting to date. I started this piece with only a color theme in mind. Warm. I wanted to paint an overwhelmingly large warm painting. As I started to paint this piece I quickly realized how my body was going to influence the painting. The curves, shapes and lines became translations of movements and the reach of my arms. Through this process, the painting divided itself into three parts. Top, the part I had to use a ladder to reach. Middle, the part I could easily approach by walking up to it with a brush. Bottom, where I had to lean down or use a stool. I let this develop naturally and decided not to fight these divisions. With all my work, I want the viewer to feel distance and perspective, but especially in this painting. The size allows the viewer to see my shapes as something you might be able to walk around and see all sides of them. The form in the middle is an arch, a shape I often revisit in my work, it gives the viewer an imagined entrance to peek though and see far off in the distance. An entrance to this imagined landscape.
Time has Width series
Time has Width came to me as a vision in the middle of the night. I woke suspended between sleep and consciousness with the words Time has Width repeating loudly in my mind. As the words repeated, I saw an entirely new body of work. Colorful paintings of timelines marked with important events. Each event was surrounded by thread like circular lines that expanded, overlapped and conversed with one another. The paintings were almost three dimensional with radiating lines spinning like moons around a planet. They were huge, wild, alive and had no orientation.
Ideas take shape as I paint. Often, an idea will spin around my studio like a destructive tornado, but eventually it will settle and I can begin to see its shape and color. Time has Width was like this when I brought into my studio. It was an unruly idea that took some time to settle. As I started to paint this series, I first painted what I saw in my vision, but over time I found there was much more to work with. I dissected the original vision of the paintings. I zoomed in on just a corner, I painted it from different angles or I imagined the timeline was a column of color that was falling apart. Then I painted the radiating lines breaking apart to form their own sense of direction. Time has Width started with my original vision but over time it has been dissected, abstracted and reimagined to make a continually evolving body of work.