My interpretation of Buddhist ideas runs throughout my recent Mandala of Ruins paintings series. The mandala first appeared in Tantric Buddhism as a form of sand painting. In the making of a mandala, different colored sand is processed through metempsychosis, like pictures changing in a kaleidoscope. It embodies the Buddhist concepts of creation, dwelling, destruction, and emptiness. As we confront the stupendous creative and destructive powers of today’s technology, the mandala for me is the best visual metaphor of our world.

In my recent work, I have been exploring how various positions can occupy the same space and how one strategy can be inserted into, or effect, another. I investigate exchanges between control and feeling, and the mind and body. I am interested in how images, meaning, and meaninglessness interact, and how the viewer relates to these interactions. The process of organizing so much imagery results in thickly textured color-fields that protrude several inches from the picture plane, both extending and depleting meaning. The physicality of paint is as excessive as the complexity of signs.

The paintings in my Night series are exterior scenes set in the midst of anonymous, silent streets illuminated by the isolated lights of the nocturnal world that turn otherwise ordinary moments into mysterious and provocative tableaux. I explore the unique effects of this charged atmosphere in order to create images that are ambiguous in narrative content and invoke complex emotional responses.