Polyurethane, custom vinyl decals, and acrylic on canvas
8 × 8 inches
Polyurethane, custom vinyl decals, and acrylic on canvas
8 × 8 inches
Polyurethane, custom vinyl decals, and acrylic on canvas
8 × 8 inches
Decalcomania and acrylic medium on paper
18 × 24 inches
Decalcomania and acrylic medium on paper
18 × 24 inches
Decalcomania and acrylic medium on paper
18 × 24 inches
Decalcomania and acrylic medium on paper
18 × 24 inches
Decalcomania and acrylic medium on paper
18 × 24 inches
Decalcomania and acrylic medium on paper
18 × 24 inches
Decalcomania and acrylic medium on paper
18 × 24 inches
When I first saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a kid, I didn't find the aliens frightening. I envied them, how they communicated with light and music rather than language. The mothership didn't feel like a threat; it seemed like home. I wanted to be beamed up. There's a sequence in the film where Richard Dreyfuss, possessed by a vision he can't name, builds a mountain out of dirt and debris in his living room, driven toward a form he can feel but not yet see. It remains one of the most accurate depictions of what it feels like to make art that I've ever encountered.
These paintings are about what light does to the air around it—ionized haze radiating outward toward something just out of frame. The heat pipes crossing my studio ceiling have always reminded me of FLIR thermal imaging, that surveillance palette of purples and oranges where heat becomes visible. I'm also fascinated by the way neon blurs outward and bleeds into surrounding atmosphere until it seems to fracture the air around it. Luminosity as desire and transcendence.