In 2010, I began to experiment with bold, monochromatic colors and acrylic “stroking,” a technique I discovered accidentally. Two bodies of work emerged.
One body of work is the Energy Series
Everything is energy. The world as we know it, the reality we experience, is the human brain’s translation of visual, sound, smell, taste, and tactile energy. The Energy Series is an exploration of the essence of energy.
Inspiration for the series began when I was revisiting the work of Vincent Van Gogh and contemplating his brush strokes. I wondered if perhaps his brush strokes expressed something relatable beyond his suffering state of mind — namely, our inherent and instinctual desire for movement.
“Nothing rests. Everything moves. Everything vibrates.” This is one of the Hermetic principles. Today, modern science recognizes matter as vibrating energy at the subatomic level. I wondered if perhaps we sense this phenomenon in Van Gogh’s brush strokes on some level and live movement vicariously through his work.
In many of my works, I explore the concept of energy as the basis for all that exists. Here, I aimed to conjure energy in motion and what it stirs inside of us. The act of working paint on canvas produced the corresponding effect — paint, substituted for energy, moving and changing shape in real-time, producing a snapshot of energy motion frozen in time, exciting us to react.
The works have a primordial or other-worldly aesthetic akin to looking at strange worlds underneath a microscope, especially when viewed up close in smaller pieces. Both effects bring us closer to experiencing the essence of energy in its simplest form.
The other body of work is the Intuitive Series
These representational pieces were created by randomly choosing a color and painting without having an idea in mind, allowing the image to emerge. Themes that were hidden in my unconscious emerged which were both personal and societal. I was surprised by what surfaced.
One unifying theme was oppression: A young girl barraged by societal dictates in Girls Growing up to be Women; domestic violence in Brute, Force; a menacing bully (which bears a resemblance to Trump) in Gorilla. The tradeoffs of intellectualism surfaced in The Downside of Intellectualism, and darkness and damnation rang out in devil and satanic images.
I used one color in each piece to emphasize a singular idea. It seemed that the colors, though selected randomly, contributed to the determination of each piece, corresponding with their common usages.