Completed during the SVA Summer Residency Program, the painting documents each day spent at the residency in the month of July, 2022. Each column represents one day, and each column occurs twice, in a semi-symmetrical reflection. Cool blues tell of time spent indoors chilling on hot summer days, while greenish ones tell of adventures walking around Manhattan. Black, violet, and sunny yellow indicate hours spent in the studio at the School of Visual Arts. Repetitive reds reference how many times the artist took the 1-Train up and down the west side of the city.
Vermilion December is the field upon which the last week of 2021 plays out. Each color represents a day, hour, place, event, or personality during the holidays. The days are represented in each column, in a symmetrical pattern, superimposed over a drawing of a poinsettia. The result is an implied landscape, or a stained-glass window looking into Yuletide.
Colour-coded memories are superimposed on drawings of the Rocky Mountains and Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. Each column representing a day, the days synchronise in a symmetrical pattern, the order of which is interrupted by undulating hills and jagged rocks.
"Thirty Days Hath November..." shows the thirty days of the eleventh month in a calendar format. The composition draws upon synesthetic observations, occurring in the minds' eye. The days of the week run right to left, rather than left to right, starting with red Monday in the upper right corner. The calendar appears on a November-brown shape, wedged between a dark red bar representing the edge of October, and a bright red shape along the bottom standing for December. These shapes exist on a field of white and black. While most synesthetic associations occur on a white field in the mind's eye, there are some instances where black is also present.
The same week in October repeats in a symmetrical pattern. Each column represents a day in which the painting was addressed. Naples Yellow, Hansa Yellow and the grain of the wood panel mark studio time, work time, and time in the woodshop. Lime green and orange appear adjacent when there was dinner with Dad. Other personalities interrupt the daily routine: Cerulean- Magenta and Green-Yellow-White are prominent characters. Moments of green and white also signify time spent harvesting tomatoes in the gardens, many of which were tangled in morning glories.
Vacation days spent in leisure - a gradient of blue manganese, broken apart with moments of burnt sienna Coffee, bright yellow Breakfast, cobalt teal Lunch, and chartreuse Dinner, and a cast of characters remembered in simple color forms: the red-and-violet baby waking at the break of dawn, a new mother as Magenta-and-Cerulean stands out like the crepe myrtles about to bloom on the street outside. Umbers and tans of Grandmother is the last voice of the evening. All occurs on a stage of spring colors - aqua Spring, March viridian, and the forsythia-yellow of April.
An azalea-colored field of "May-genta" meets the stone-white of Memorial Day, which encases the events of the last week of May. Each column represents a day, all of which form a rhythmic pattern, symmetrical, folding in on the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend. The blue-grey mornings occur at the bottom, and speak of slow starts to each day. Naples Yellow marks the hours in studio, and various color patterns mention meetings with various characters. Top-heavy, the composition speaks to a schedule of tranquil mornings and engaging nights.
Completed during the Summer Residency program at SVA in 2022, "July Grind" is comprised of fifteen individual panels. Color-data transcribed through synesthesia documents three weeks in July. Each panel represents one day. Each row, from right to left, documents the events of one work week, Monday through Friday. The sequence of color blocks on the bottom edge is the color-coded indication of the date.
Each column contains color-data and memories for one day, re-addressed over the course of 13 days. The duration can be read from right to left beginning at Monday Red and ending on a Saturday. Colors and sequences that break the grid are memories of people and places in retrospect, thinking back on events as time goes by. The surface of the painting was abraded consistently in contrast to the accumulation of new days and color-data. System and routine are a calm place to be, but are often unreliable for longevity. You just have to pick right back up when you fall off. This painting is about returning to a sense of purpose in the midst of post-holiday malaise.
Three days erode and move through time, toward the last frame of the panel, where a red number 8 appears on the third day, over a disrupted pink field. The image of a coffee cup starts off each day at the bottom edge, and is abraded with passing time. It emits a bluish-green cloud, representing the personality of my best friend on their birthday.
Spring Equinox and the transition into April occurs in columns, each representing the events of one day, layered over a still- life underpainting, in which a Buddha statue sits serenely under a window palm tree, and stacks of books, the shapes of which imitate the stacked "hours" and moments in time.
Painting is a means of documenting personal and felt experiences in every day life. The repetitive color palette throughout my work has symbolic meaning. As an artist experiencing synesthesia, I associate numbers, letters, units of time, people and places with colors, each instance having its own intrinsic color value. I've developed a color-coded system of language based on these associations. I use a palette knife to lay down layers of geometric color forms in a hard-edge format, which are subjected to scraping and abrading the paint surface. The process exposes the paintings to the accumulative and destructive nature of time, while the abstracted memories are obscured by circumstance. The result is a landscape-like composition, a window into the past, and an art object conveying the history of its making.