2014

"The first paintings of the rest of my life"

I will always remember 2014. My current work is an outgrowth of this series. Below is my original statement from this period.

Songwriting, for me, is a kind of journey, a passage to some unknown place.

You never, ever know where you are going, but you must always be on the frontier…
    —Carey Mercer

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I make imaginary places out of paint. Starting with a blank surface, I begin in one area, and let the painting grow organically, working without reference to source materials. This group of paintings came about by accident, and I find the iconography and symbolism growing and expanding as I go, like a world evolving out of my hand. While music, art history, and philosophy continue to nurture my practice, I let randomness, trial and error, and an inner sense of aesthetic intuition determine the evolution of each painting. This is also undoubtedly shaped by my early immersion in the dense forests, tidal swamps and logging roads of rural Vancouver Island, an adolescence soaked in Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Dungeons and Dragons, and a childhood of beach fires, stargazing, and Sunday school at a little evangelical church in the woods.

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I consider a painting finished when colour, gesture, surface, symbolism and space intertwine to create a strange, wild place, convincing yet otherworldly, simultaneously  embryonic and cannibalistic, primordial and post-apocalyptic, Garden of Eden and Gates of Hell.