WELCOME TO CREATIVITY
IN THE MAKING

The body of my visual work consists of what I call "digital paintings."  And it is fair to say that they often literally arise from an interplay between intent and the aleatory.  One might even think of many of these "paintings" as mute improvisations of ideational forms that capture imagery created/perceived by how one thinks about what is seen.

 

Of course, the infinitely rich dialogue between color and form that is available to any visual artist only physically finds expression as a tangible artifact of the creative mind.  And I would argue that it is, therefore, pointless to question or attempt to retrace  an impulsive moment of creation whose raison d'être is to spontaneously generate a kind of shadow of itself as "the work."

 

My visualizations (that's what I call them) are all part of a process of perceiving the actual imaginatively.  And, to that extent, the generative creative process I employ partakes of a very long historical tradition in visual plastic expression.

 

So much of the visual arts -- and one might argue all of art -- begins with a point of view that isolates (focuses on) the particular.  This is profoundly fascinating, revealing, and meaningful for me because our individual experience of reality is inherently bound up with the subjective.

 

As an attorney, my profession makes this exquisitely clear since what we so often witness or advocate becomes a clash of perspectives, and not necessarily a conflict between right and wrong, or between what is correct or incorrect.  And, ultimately, the subjectivity of those who judge will resolve the contrasts and possibilities one way or another.  And so too in the realm of aesthetic expression and perception.

 

The abstract image below and various other "digital paintings" of mine come under my assigned conceptual rubric of "MacroCosm -- Macro Explorations of the Micro Universe."  As is the case with many contemporary and earlier visual artists, painting,  for me, can include and go far beyond the use of a brush and paint medium and canvas.  I "paint" digitally with light, color, form, composition, and resolution (as in manipulating the underlying pixilated substrate of my "canvas").

 

Procedurally, I often take an object or image and examine it on my computer screen at varying magnifications and orientations because by doing so one can see different things, details, congruencies, contrasts, degrees of granularity, and configurations that are all implicit or buried in the object or image.  The magnifications "reset" in my perception what is prominent or significant, hence the "meaning" of what is depicted as an object or image, and thus the title of a work.  This suggests that at a different magnification the meaning of the object or image may be something else entirely, as occurs in physics or biology when one magnifies the realm of the very small.

 

I often don't alter the shape or configuration of the object or image.  It is what it is, but I may alter the saturation, brightness, contrast, and hue(s) for effect.

 

These visualizations can all be physically reproduced as artifacts for purchase and display (whether as "photographic" paintings on canvas or as computerized digital images on museum-grade paper, polished-aluminum sheets, or on high-gloss acrylic plastic panels, or otherwise).

 

As with so much in the arts, whether the creative end product is "striking" is precisely the "impact" of isolating or extracting significance from a larger ambiguous or generalized whole.

 

As I see it, the perhaps infinitely variable nature of perception can be one of the most intriguing and inexhaustible realms of delight that we can experience as sensual beings, which only enhances our encounter with living.