2014 to 2017: Cityscapes

In my latest series, I wanted to capture the feeling of location. To study the relationships formed within a city between all its divergent pieces and forms. I wanted to somehow express the complexity, diversity, and beauty of the cities we live in as well as the sense of time that is felt as the city experiences its decay. We move through many levels of decay and revelation in a city before we reveal the core of its identity.

I like the idea of nuance and individualism against a backdrop of the crush of humanity in a city. There is a feeling of being small and irrelevant, but pushing against that is the forging of individual identity with the nuance and specific’s of city life.

This new series of paintings use round and rectangular shaped panels to explore, interpret and express the energy and flow of this thought process. The round panels are mandalas. These come from the perspective of looking straight up from a city street and seeing the tall buildings converge on a central point. When one looks straight up from a downtown street, perspective is lost. Things turn into abstraction because as one loses their point of reference everything turns on itself. The beginning is the end, a mandala. Mandalas can be seen as microcosm of the universe from the human perspective.

When you turn your gaze down and look from the horizontal perspective, One can recognize outlines and buildings used to identify a location and a horizon is identified. The foreground composition consists of colors and forms inspired by short glances, impressions, and photographs of areas I visit while traveling in the Southern California area. I try to contrast the idea of a fleeting unbalanced glance with the balance achieved in stasis. The rectangular paintings in my series demonstrate this concept.

I use negative space behind the forms to tell as much of the story as possible. The use of negative space for me is about finding a place to fit in; the relationship between what is there and what is not, it speaks of location. The composition is a balance between the negative space in the back and the forms and outlines in the foreground.

The palette in this new series gives more emphasis to the intermediate colors that are more muted, but still vibrant, which cover most of the space. These intermediate colors are composed to create contrast and vibrant interaction with each other.