​Our brains pulse with neural electricity, charged by excitations of light and shadow. Visual experience is localized in our cognition- color is registered in one location, line and depth in another. I seek to directly stimulate these regions of the brain. I am interested in the visual impact of painting and it’s possible effects on emotions and mental health. My paintings are meditations on perceptual distortion- a tool to better understanding the distortions of the mind. They are studies of optical illusion and color theory that rest on an armature of moire.

       I build my paintings from back to front in a process of strict accounting: I mix gradients in sequences of varying hue, value, and saturation. I then apply tape and masking fluid to canvas to create networks of thin stripes that intersect at slanting angles. The color-modulated lines weave together and produce animated fields that simultaneously recall cabaret curtains, stovetop flame, and the spectral vibrancy of the aurora borealis. I want to produce images of what lies behind the eyes; the sacred fire of consciousness.

       These paintings flicker between the orchestrated and the organic: they direct focus to individual moments of color that are immersed in a system that resembles animal camouflage- like snakeskin or avian plumage. They perform a magic trick; up close, you see fine intersecting lines that create narrow diamonds of hue. Step back, and the composition coalesces into a spread of sensations that is fixed, fluid and warped- oscillating between patterned and patternlessness.

       ​I paint because visual sensation is psychophysical- it transforms our thoughts. The tension that links granular color experience and optical illusion generates questions about self-understanding. Like individual selfhood, each painting is ordered though random, systematized but entropic. They are sites for witnessing consciousness. Our minds alone are the producer of ecstasy and suffering, a lesson I internalized while working as an overnight operator on a suicide hotline. Coping with trauma, panic, and dissociation is a matter of proximity to the event. The way we decode percepts— received environmental data about what is happening around us— is a high stakes affair. 

       Each move in my paintings is tightly planned and executed. When the final mask is taken off, however, the particular consequence of each decision is striking and unforeseen. This mystery compels me. Science, politics and technology recount an ever-narrowing view of what it means to be human, pulling our attention from one algorithmically engineered solution to the next. My paintings lure the eye into new, uncertain spaces.