Artist Statement 

"Nothing is more concrete or real than a line, a color, or a plane of color."
-Theo van Doesburg / 1930.

For my work, I am partial to collecting and using found illustrations, mechanical and scientific drawings and plans, typography, schematics, signs, anything with a foregrounded linear quality.  These kick-start the development of an image, from a beginning sketch of a particular piece of the found element that is appealing and suggests other points of discovery; then through working and reworking the drawing that develop images having a certain inscrutability to them. These become the main images of the compositions, placed upon backgrounds of worked surfaces that show a combination of tenacity and roughness through scarred, sanded and pocked paint surfaces.

My interest lies in what can be added, deleted and manipulated in creating an image, as much subtractive as additive. The work indulges my interest in beauty through destruction and adaptation; it satisfies an impulse for organization in use of the grid and systematic compositions, and the desire to complicate rather than simplify, to add things through intense investigating of materials and outcomes rather than allow a work to be reduced for neat interpretation. The pieces shift from geometric/diagrammatic to organic/intuitive, and each one contains space for subtlety and doubt, even to the point of opening the work up to misunderstanding.

“Art is actually always about insufficiency, the personal desire to achieve something greater than what is possible, to capture the universal in the particular.”
-Sean Tatol / 2023