These first three images are from a series "Snapshots" that I have been working on for the past several months. The first is Make A Rising Performance, the second is Long Beach Island, and the third is Northeast Extension. They are all oil on gessoed paper, 4x6" in size. These pieces serve as my investigation into perception, environment, and memory. I am especially interested in how the instantaneous moment of observation, or sensation, translates into a long-term memory of the moment and environment. This has developed into a style that oscillates between painterly and illustrative. I allow the spatial environment (usually interior, but occasionally exterior) to be softer and fuzzier, while sharpening and flattening the decorative and colorful bits that are sharp in my mind. I try to work from memory, exclusively, but occasionally I work from a combination of life and memory. I've chosen the standard photograph size because I want to juxtapose the idea of an instantaneous snapshot, or capture of information, against the lengthy re-hashing of the moment in oil paint. And, when you hold all the pieces together, flipping through as you would flip through a photo album, the information in each piece is diminished. I believe that looking at all the pieces, so similar in size and format, in rapid succession parallels the way we deal with the immense visual experience we undergo every day: incapable of taking it all in, aware of only certain details. I therefore put the viewer through my own process of taking in and storing information. Unfortunately, this newfangled blog thingy doesn't really capture that part of the experiment so well.
