Artist Statement

My goal as an artist is to express the abstract beauty and joy I perceive in purely conceptual constructs such as mathematical functions or scientific hypotheses; to question the boundaries between the diverse disciplines I study, and put forth a playful personal translation between them. My work offers my projection onto paper and paint of some hypothetical, mystical, symbolic view of various theoretical ideas. I wish to create an opportunity for dialogue between the sciences and the arts, both in my work and in the minds of its viewers. I have realized, and I hope to help others realize, that these fields do not have to be as orthogonal as is generally supposed; that art and science have a common ground in beauty and creativity, in the desire to explore and discover.

I work in a rather strictly non-figurative manner. I do not represent objects; even my representation of ideas is fundamentally abstract in that I do not set out planning cerebrally to translate theoretical concepts to visual art. Despite what some may imagine to be the dryness, the conceptualism of some of the subjects that interest me, I immerse myself in these fields by impulsive desire, by instinctive need. I then create, in an improvisational manner. I include a fragment of a scribbled equation here, a molecular diagram there, because of the visual appeal they hold for me. Only afterwards come control, reflection, and selection, in the combination of layers and the composition of panels; in the choosing of my titles, translating to my audience some of the meanings that can be found in my imagery. Even this tends to be more a meditative process than a cerebral one.

I use a lot of automatic drawing and painting in my work. I am particularly interested by motifs, traces and complex textures formed by chance, whether it be by nature, by the vestiges of civilization, or by my intervention; and by automatic, gestural marks and vigorous dramatic brushstrokes. The fragments of photographs I include are zoomed-in details chosen for the abstract forms and patterns they contain, not their literal meanings. One of the characteristics of my work is making use of the great artistic potentials of new technology while retaining a painterly, natural-media look.

I favour polyptychs and inset panels. For me, the polyptych form is both simply a visceral visual preference, and a conceptual choice. I depict abstract subjects by disparate views juxtaposed in one image, symbolizing that one thing, or concept, seen by different people or from different angles, looks very different. My images are about the more complete vision that comes from seeing more than one side of a story.