Photography

Photography is often as integral a part of the creative process as the fundamental act of drawing itself. While most of my photography has been pursued for the practical purposes of providing artistic source material, many photos do also stand on their own.

Various large-scale works

Mural 

Selected works

Traditional Media 

A selection of paintings and prints.

Upside-Down Painting

Acrylic glass painting and monoprints

UDP

UDP is a painting method which I developed over the course of many years of artistic explorations. It involves a synthesis between acrylic painting and printmaking.

These paintings are "upside-down" because the workflow is entirely reversed:

One begins by painting the top layers, then works down through the middle layers, and finally completing the process with the undercoat. Glass is used to hold the paint until the process is completed. At the end of the process the painting is printed onto canvas, and the canvas is stretched and mounted. The resulting look is unique and texturally distinctive.

Chaos Growing Trees series
A specialized branch of Upside-Down Painting explorations; studies of highly complex texture

CGT UDP 

The CGT UDP series is an essentialistic exploration of chaos. The method is my own, drawing upon a range of interests, including fluid and particle dynamics, printmaking, acrylic painting, and glass painting. In this method, one sets up delicately balanced conditions, and the painting then paints itself. Really! The painting must "develop" on its own. Under the right conditions, the painting will grow in a highly organic manner. The "growing" is not due to microbial activity, nor to any special chemical processes, but rather occurs as a result of a set of conditions by which chaos itself becomes the dominant artist.

The use of the word 'chaos' is a slight misnomer. "Actual chaos" or "full chaos" is useless for most purposes (e.g. with paint: mud; with sound: white noise; with taste: bland); "full order" is also of little use (e.g. with paint: sitting in the tube; with sound: a single pure tone; with taste: an isolated flavour). So more specifically, the context is an exploration of "the edge of chaos", the region of conditions in the interface between order and chaos and the universal context condusive to fractal formations (as well as the efficient running of any typical studio or office, and just about any particular creative process). Accordingly, these paintings exhibit fractal forms.

The naming of the method with the words "Growing" and "Tree" describe a particularly interesting facet of the process which procures self-forming fractal branch patterns, one of many possible emergent forms.

A few rules-of-thumb with the method:

- The surface of the painting is not to be touched during the painting process (in deference to the chaos in use).

- External environmental conditions may be adjusted, but should have a generalized effect. In particular, the glass surface upon which the painting forms must be perfectly level in order to contain the 'primeval soup' which arises upon it.

- paint layers are only applied evenly and across the entire surface, without the use of a brush (minimized use of "divine intervention").

- a degree of composition is allowed via the placement of "interference objects" on the surface of the glass. These help to catalyze the chaotic growing / fractal effects.

- Aside from these interference objects, only paint media are used (nothing "more exotic" is required in terms of materials).

- a finishing undercoat is applied for better color balance and luminosity.

The UDP CGT method requires a delicate balance on "the edge of chaos". This is difficult to achieve, and many works, particularly in earlier stages of exploration, were overwhelmed by chaos and had to be abandoned.

The resulting textures are extremely complex, texturally rich, and visually compelling. At a deeper level, the CGT UDP method is motivated by a desire to explore the philosophical relationships between creation (whether by intent, by method, by selection, or the complex combinations of all of these in ongoing iterative processes), chance (in complex form via chaos), and the associated concepts of evolution; perhaps leading to a more informed understanding of these most fundamental factors in processes of procurement - whether it be cosmological, biological, designed & engineered, sociological, or purely artistic, as seen here.