Thesis Intro GWC

This project evolved from my concerns about transformation processes occurring in the natural environment resulting from the cumulative effects of human activity. It investigates what may be the greatest transformation process created by mankind, generally referred to as global warming. The subject itself is abstruse and complex in that after more than thirty years of environmental data collection and analysis, it is only recently beginning to be recognized as an incipient global threat that cannot be stopped. As disastrous weather events like Hurricane Katrina continue, global cultural transformations may also evolve from a new paradigm of how man and nature’s survival are interrelated.

My approach to this subject derives from my technical and artistic backgrounds and interests. From my previous career as an aerospace systems engineer working in space-based sensor systems, I have an analytical understanding of earth phenomenology, satellite observation systems and image data processing. As a painter and printmaker for thirty years, I have assimilated skills and art history up to the present post-Postmodernist period. More importantly, my perspective also gives direction to my work: I believe that painting can express a personal vision that can resonate with a greater general truth about our time.

What more is transformation but a sequence of moments, events, and states that are related by cause and effect? Actually, capturing a process of change, which fundamentally involves the dimension of time, in a static two-dimensional painting is inherently conceptual and requires abstraction. A painting reflects the human consciousness as well, being a translation of many phenomena sensed over time and converting sensations into images that express meaning.

Thus, I draw on these backgrounds to make abstract, mixed media paintings about transformation, particularly concerning cyclic and interactive processes. My process is a personal transformation of these random and ordered elements into the language of color, line, shape, and space. I substitute reprocessed images, diagrams and symbols for physical realities that extend relationships and suggest other meanings. An abstract landscape emerges in the painted forms, lines and spaces and their subsequent interactions.