solo exhibition
Re:Find Gallery on the Arts Walk
Allentown, Pennsylvania
April 20-May 14, 2017
The show opens April 20 with a reception from 5-8pm. Artist talk/Q&A on may 7 from 2-4pm
Impermanence is the most unfailingly consistent condition we experience. For better or worse it’s the most constant state of both poetic beauty and tragic suffering.
This awareness that everything is temporary can be comforting when we have to endure suffering. Then, we cling to temporariness, knowing that time will pass. We wish for it to go quickly and not drag us under it’s relentless forward motion so we can get to the other side of whatever is paining us.
But temporariness can swing the opposite way, devastating us when we feel it’s too soon for something to end or someone to pass.Then, we cling to time, hoping that our grip will slow it’s momentum and bring us flush with what we hope to keep.
‘For the time being’ is a phrase that has always felt like a bridge between present and future. A sometimes more comforting reminder of impermanence, the phrase seems to embody the awareness of time as both precious and transient. ‘This too shall pass’ simultaneously coupled with‘don’t wish away time’
Clouds have always been the symbol of that impermanence for me. Their forms constantly changing in service of and as a reaction to their environment. The expression of their purpose fleeting across their bodies making a short but sincere biography. They are at once the beginning of things and the end of things. Painting them from memory and imagination is a way to cultivate the practice and art of paying attention and refine mindfulness.
This series of paintings started with the desire to make work that held both the motion and the rest, the action and the reflection, the present and the future, the inhale and the exhale. I also wanted to explore what it would feel like to paint large paintings quickly, sometimes in one or two sessions; to make them feel like they were built from an almost spontaneous impulse and not premeditation. The ultimate goal was to try and position myself and the task of painting to ride parallel to the momentum of time passing, being both witness and recorder.
