Developing a new language of abstraction

Ever since creating abstract collages in 2011 as a response to the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactor caused by a massive earthquake, I have been fascinated with the creation of visual abstract languages. I explored color and shape in both the “Space/Time” and “Meditations on the Square” monotype series. In my most recent body of work, utilizing mixed media etched wood panels, I focused on how the world around us offers amazing opportunities for exciting visual abstractions representing a deep link between our own microcosm and the magnificence of the cosmos.
This new work started with visual explorations of that most abstract of arts, Jazz. A commission about synesthesia initiated my attempts to use color and form to approximate what I felt from this radical music. This year I started drawing with colored pencil and graphite on various papers, distilling my earlier explorations into a more cohesive vocabulary. The drawing process was essential to this process due to its immediacy and simplicity. I continue down that path, bringing in collage alongside the drawing, eager to see where this will lead.

RIDDLES, MYSTERIES AND VISIONS. An artist's search for meaning in life.

We live in a world where every question can be answered by the click of a mouse, where we can visit ancient monuments from the comfort of our armchair, a world where the mysterious has become obsolete. Religion has been fatally corrupted by power and decadence, knowledge has replaced wisdom, and information has become a product in itself. In this world more is better, excess is stylish, and "reality" is more likely to refer to a television program than a personal experience. This is a world where the ephemeral is glorified over the substantial and where meaning is not just hard to find, but is seen as both irrelevant and quaint.
And so I have asked myself "Where do I find meaning in my life and in my art?". Looking back at my work with skulls and thorns in Rituals and Meditations and earlier where I was using fabrics and flowers, I could see myself searching for meaning. This earlier work was characterized by an intensity and vitality expressed most especially through color and pattern, and while I see now that this very vitality was an expression of meaning in itself, at the time this did not feel enough.
This new work began after taking a year's break from painting, in which I created collages inspired by the Fukushima tsunami, which washed my own creative world clean and allowed me to start afresh. Thru my love of African music, such as hi-life and Afro-Beat I was inspired to express rhythm in color and form, and which in then created the basic compositional structure of this new work. My personal obsessions were distilled into abstract symbols and shapes and these replaced the centrality previously held by representation.
Here I share carnal ceremonies, and fierce, rhythmic visions. There are no answers here, only the delirious delights of mysteries and riddles. These paintings offer my private adventures on the stormy seas of the unknown and the unknowable, stories both ancient and modern, siren songs to lure you into experiencing life in all its beauty and power.

RITUALS AND MEDITATIONS. Personal Archetypes of Myth, Magic and Beauty

These paintings are visual keys that explore the mystery of beauty. Using ritualistic creative processes that allow me to connect with my inner unconscious reality, I explore some of the paradoxical and magical aspects of life. An energetic attraction connects objects that have personal meaning for me, such as stones collected from beaches around the world, dead leaves found while out walking, thorns from the black Locust tree, animal and human skulls, and creates compositions that contain an intense and focused devotional energy that honors the disturbing balance of opposites that is the inner core of beauty.

It is disturbing because it exposes the paradoxical honesty that is the world. Beauty has to be both yin and yang, both light and dark, both life and death, both stability and motion, both emptiness and fullness, both black and white. It represents the unknown and often the unknowable, and is contained in the wordless power of these mysterious images.