NOTES FOR PARASTRATA

There’s a wonderful Sanskrit phrase Sandhya-bhasha, meaning Twilight Language - language that deliberately exists in the liminal spaces of dusk and the edge of actualization, that which is half expressed and half concealed.  Painting too, is just such a language, able to mediate between the non-demonstrable and the real.  Painting becomes interlingual, translating from one level of experience to another.

These paintings float upon a base of Western traditions; the atmospheric scumblings of Turner, the late fields of Monet, the desires of early and mid 20th century abstraction, and finally the liberations made available by postmodernism, when the distinctions between pictorial languages dissolved, scrambled, and blurred. Into this territory swirl flying apsaras from China, Taoist landscapes, floating worlds, the colors of India and tantric raptures, the infinite webs and one world theories of contemporary science, and mediated images.  The swishing of celestial forms intersects with thick chunks of paint, enacting what Jerry Saltz called paintings crucial weapon - “the mystical ability to embed thought in viscous substance”.

I allow the paintings to range from slow and contemplative to ecstatic sensory overload, wanting them to function as integrative systems.  Polysemous images shudder between assertion and dissolution, probing the possibilities of magical fact.  I use recombinant strategies, gathering together unattainable presences and sticky realities, wondering through what technologies and practices does contemporary culture envision and conjure the unseen?