I came across an interview of Francis Bacon by the late British art critic, David Sylvester in which Bacon states that art is an obsession with life. Those words struck me as being both familiar and new - like looking at myself in a mirror.
When young, I would return to stare at the square right-angled grey tiles like a cow habitually goes to a salt lick. I’d patiently wait for that threshold of visual fatigue when I’d then thrill to the tiles’ apparent and virtual rhythmic, alternating back and forth diagonal motion. Figments and phenomena are realities.
Our experiences of the world are mediated through the synthesis of opposites - however jarringly overt or meditatively subtle. I particularize and apply painting’s codes and conventions towards its own inherent and conflicted precondition as an illusory/object using a vocabulary of opposites; squared circles, cubed spheres, or the hybridized quatrefoil shape,
As when choosing between the tasty prompts offered by a mixed box of chocolates, codified by shape and design, or watching the fated storyline of “afternoon TV”, one engages a conceit - an extended metaphor or formatted subjectivity. Similarly, my paintings are essentially prompts, which are realized through being observed. Metaphorical, narrative and formal prompts co-exist. The “painting”, in effect, virtually exists between its surface and the receptive viewer.
As painted prompts and fictive figments, spanning the obvious to the ineffable, my paintings’ trajectory, their reach, are to be realized as felt experience, fictive realities made manifest.