Most of my work is initially inspired by observation. I am formally trained in printmaking and ceramics eventually working more in paint media and more recently in glass.
The symbols in the work evolved mostly from visual experiences I had while driving through the city for my job. I seemed to notice older more rudimentary structures like old grain elevators, smokestacks, water tanks and towers juxtaposed against the land and sometimes the frozen sky. In some cases I noticed the triangular shapes of the steel structure on the cranes or the tops of the smoke stacks painted red and white as if they were minimalist sculptures protruding into the atmosphere.
These structures seem to contain a basic geometry possibly due to their physical function that lended itself to the forms they took. They were somehow symbolic to me especially the way the light reflected off these structures in planes and leaving interested shapes in spaces between and I became fixated on them.
Initially my surrealist work existed somewhere in between representation and abstraction exploring formal and personal concerns using landscape as a metaphor and an abstracted summation of these “figures”. (Heart and Soul) The horizon line and the vertical shapes seemed like being in the middle of a Mondrian painting, experiencing the horizontal and vertical, the plus and the minus.
Over time the work has evolved to take the shapes and planes and lines out of context the same way Kandinski discussed isolating a punctuation mark from the sentence (On Spirituality in Art). Most of the forms you will see in my work are a simplified liquification of these visual experiences, the way light interacts with these forms, a simplified horizon line and the shapes that occur in the space between. In a way it could be described as turning space and light into a shaped object.
One could say that my work is a residue of geometry, the stuff between the structures. There is not one without the other.
Moving forward I am beginning to work in more 3 dimensional sculptures combining glass, wood, steel and other materials. This is creating a huge learning curve and requiring a great commitment to educate myself. I am curiously interested about the possibility incorporating light as an element of the work especially since I might be illuminating objects inspired from the shape of light.