Portfolio of Works
Light patterns in the deciduous southern forest and its edges have fascinated me for many years. Dappled light: distinct clusters of precise elipses, first noticed swaying across a roadway in summer; then during full moon night and again in winter across vast national forest wilderness. These paintings are studies that began with photographs of National Forest wilderness in southern Appalachia. The dappled light pattern overlying bare trees was the inspiration. The studies explore color and space, rhythm and movement, scale and perspective in abstract landscapes.
Once, when searching for new imagery, I became curious about clusters of eliptical shapes that sometimes play across surfaces around my home and studio. The Aperture Series paintings represent my exploration of those patterns and their source. Light as it passes between leaves and branches in the forest canopy. Records of orbit and rotation, wind and season, light and shadow, small events that will never again occur in exactly the same way.
On Psychic Energy”, Collected Works, vol.8, par. 100 (Princeton University Press, 1978), 53-54.
My paintings capture Nature’s chronology. Beneath naked branches, deciduous trees drop their leaves, creating pools of intense color. Swells from underground springs or gusts of wind rearrange the leaves creating a history of their force. Color and spatial relationships among elliptical shapes create layered patterns where leaves come to rest, glistening in dappled sunlight, perhaps submerged or floating in water. Layer upon layer deposited in cycles of days and months through the years. These are the images that capture my attention and call me to explore.
I seek to capture the visual essence of these mundane natural events marking the temporal collective. In the process, I abandon representation for lyrical relationships, simplified shapes, intense colors and the spaces that they occupy. As I work, applying multiple layers of color, relationships become more complex as they accumulate. Implications may parallel human development and life experience. Finally, coming full circle to denote the collective of nature, offering visual metaphor to Jung’s collective unconscious.
