Dog Bones

This piece felt like an excavation more than a painting.  Instead of layering, overlapping, and building texture, I was digging into the layer laid before, revealing darkened and stained distortions of the previously forgotten marks. The pastel and paint was peeling as I dashed and scribbled the ball-point pen across the surface, leaving valleys, edges, and streaks of color peaking through the thinned surface. Inklings of objects began to reveal themselves as if I was wiping away the layers of dirt.

Did I really find any objects. No. It's paint. But your mind starts to connect the dots. The circles connect to lines, lines to squares, open space to open space. Soon an oval becomes an eye, a t-shape becomes a cross, a circle becomes a brain...You start to see things become objects and with that, you start to make marks that further define those, furthering your connection to them, and deepening the meaning.

It's the process I want the viewer to take. You wouldn't look at a page in a book and say you understand it...you gotta read the words. With a painting, you can't just stand there and wait for it to tell you what it means...you have to look at it like a book. Symbols as words, objects as characters. That way, you build the story, you connect the dots, you become part of the piece.