From the Sumerian version of the Tower of Babel as told in Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta.:
“The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech." So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused (balal) the language of all the earth, and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.”
As an artist, I am interested in symbols and their meanings. Taken on their own, the letters of the alphabet are nothing more than abstract shapes, each one creating a differnet symbol. Strung together in the right order these abstract shapes form words, which is the basis of all communication. Something so common that we take them completely for granted. As a painter I am interested the graphic qualities of these symbols and the possibilities they afford me in the making of my paintings.
These paintings are made by overlapping stencilled letters, one on top of each other until they start to lose their identity as a “letter”. I further obscure thier identity by wiping away portions of this jumble of stencilled letters with rags and palette knives and painting directly over portions of it. This process allows me to look for new possible shapes that can be created from the happenstance of all this destruction. I repeat this process of rebuilding and destoying (stenciling, wiping, scraping etc...) until a new "species" of alphabet emerges. Some remnants of the original letters may remain which act to illustrate the evolution of this new species from the old. The paintings end up with a richly textured surface with it's evolution tracable by leaving visible all the pentimenti of my mark making decisions.
In this world besieged by technology, envirormental disasters, political factions, and the questioning of truth – these paintings with their partly indecipherable and fractured letters are my visual represetation of the modern day Tower of Babel in which we now reside.
“The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech." So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused (balal) the language of all the earth, and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.”
As an artist, I am interested in symbols and their meanings. Taken on their own, the letters of the alphabet are nothing more than abstract shapes, each one creating a differnet symbol. Strung together in the right order these abstract shapes form words, which is the basis of all communication. Something so common that we take them completely for granted. As a painter I am interested the graphic qualities of these symbols and the possibilities they afford me in the making of my paintings.
These paintings are made by overlapping stencilled letters, one on top of each other until they start to lose their identity as a “letter”. I further obscure thier identity by wiping away portions of this jumble of stencilled letters with rags and palette knives and painting directly over portions of it. This process allows me to look for new possible shapes that can be created from the happenstance of all this destruction. I repeat this process of rebuilding and destoying (stenciling, wiping, scraping etc...) until a new "species" of alphabet emerges. Some remnants of the original letters may remain which act to illustrate the evolution of this new species from the old. The paintings end up with a richly textured surface with it's evolution tracable by leaving visible all the pentimenti of my mark making decisions.
In this world besieged by technology, envirormental disasters, political factions, and the questioning of truth – these paintings with their partly indecipherable and fractured letters are my visual represetation of the modern day Tower of Babel in which we now reside.