Artist’s Statement

I always wanted to be an artist.  Until the early 1990′s I was all about the sort of eye-hand coordination required to draw and paint visually (paint what you see).  Then I became intensely curious about how image was communicated through the marks I made.  I continue to be fascinated by marks and mark-making, pattern, aesthetics, and the location of meaning.

My work really took a turn twelve or fifteen years ago as I experimented with patterns produced by ’tiling’.  I was arranging painted tiles in grids using a computer model I invented.  I’d produced hundreds of thousands of designs this way.  It came as a surprise to me that even with a very small number of identical tiles, the number of different patterns is large.  For example, in a minimal grid of four tiles high by four across, there are more than four TRILLION (4^16) arrangements!  If I look at two patterns per second, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for SIXTY years I still would not view them all!  In order to create a smaller universe, I limited my exploration to symmetrical arrangements – grids which look the same no matter how the grid is rotated.  There are  64 unique patterns (ignoring congruent patterns due to offsets and reflections).  In these arrangements, there are always four tiles oriented ‘up’, four ‘right’, four ‘left’, and four ‘down’.  It is easy to view the different patterns and arrangements.

I realized something astounding:  In these symmetrical arrangements of identical parts – I LIKED some of the patterns and DISLIKED others!  I spent a LONG time trying to understand WHY and could not.  It seemed to me that I had discovered a fundamental boundary between science (what I could understand) and art (what I could feel) and I realized that aesthetics is entirely unconscious.  This has influenced all my subsequent work as I attempt to balance unconscious and conscious.  I feel my way to images which I ‘like’ (which call out to become art) and I invent new processes and techniques to precipitate objects as directly from my mind into reality as I can.  I use computers and computer-guided machinery in most of my work these days and I’m mostly producing large heads of friends and family.  I’m no longer much concerned with eye-hand coordination.  I’ve become deeply concerned with what I’m making and how I’m making it.