To create a visual/conceptual backdrop for my paintings, I employ strategies derived from post-painterly and gestural abstraction, hard-edge painting, impressionism, and atmospheric perspective. The synthesis of these painting dialects gives each piece both object-presence and a dynamic spatial interior. There is constancy and interdependency in the “dynamic” gray-scale interiors and the often tri-color “static” borders, which, framelike and hard-edged, wrap around the painting. The shared threads running through the dynamic and static elements of each piece suggest that these facets are not at odds, but rather are parts of a larger whole that has the objective aspect of reality. I consider my works ends in themselves. I hope that they are pleasing to the eye, while perhaps provoking foundational-to-life considerations about what is grounding, sustaining, and perhaps purposing “the whole” in this complex world we share.