When I look at paintings, and when I paint, I always feel there is a struggle between abstraction and representation. On one hand there is the objective reality of the surface, and then there is the subjective interpretation of the image. This tension, I think, is the excitement at the core of painting and is what I explore when I paint. As abstraction, my cityscape paintings give me a freedom of working expressively with surface, the tactile joy of the paint itself. Architecture is abstract to begin with, and, while it lives within rules, it can invent itself.
Architecture is among our first expressions of surface.
The treatment of architectural form and surface seems to beg for expressiveness as a contrast to its own ideal structure. These cityscapes are also unavoidably representational. Behind the surfaces, and in front of them, we imagine spaces for things to happen, places to be explored, extensions of our own space. Our minds are hungry to resolve the forms and spaces our eyes see, especially when we see ambiguity. Our inventiveness in assigning meanings and contexts is satisfied as we resolve the illusions of stark, hard-edged realism.