These paintings are rooted in the physicality of urban landscape and the luminous buzz of evening light. Densely layered and decisively edited, they feel solid and rooted, yet open and breathing. Shapes group together, locking in and setting up a spatial structure that takes on a slightly disjunctive shift as implied connections and ghost images assert an alternate read.

The paintings are built as elemental constructions of shifting interior/exterior spaces and as visual dialogues of call-and-response phrases. They reflect a particular attitude about improvisation, focusing not on complex elaborations, but rather on the concentrated way that parts contribute to the underlying visual statement. This involves a spare economy of means in which nothing is extra, and everything is necessary.

The paintings evoke local and familiar places of everyday life – the street, neighborhood, rooftop, back porch, and the studio. As abstract paintings, they also speak to something even more local – an intimate sense of lived experience within one’s body, including pre-verbal observations not yet coalesced into fixed images, alive and reconfiguring at the level of our synapses.

Configurations and tonal intervals are stepped apart, incorporating a sense of discontinuity or disruption in which surprising pockets of space open up. These seemingly contradictory reads engage viewers in negotiating challenging spaces, which do resolve, similar to the way polyrhythms can resolve in music. Another aspect of music relevant to how these paintings function involves resultant tones when voices interact, constructing what we hear as an implicit third voice. Spatial configurations in these paintings link together and read in a way that switches, taking shape not as a fixed image, but as a series of resultants. This may sound mysterious, but it’s a specific and integral part of what happens in seeing these paintings.

Making them requires restless inquiry, improvisation, and being attuned to bringing forth and resolving the emerging content as it most needs to be. They are charged and punctuated visual situations for looking at and into, as challenging, resonant places for durational seeing and thought.

For painting to resonate in this way is not a given, but it’s possible for it to serve as a concentrated and viable contemplation device for both painter and viewer – painting as a communicative visual presence, for being with upon the slow read.