2004
Fish gotta swim
Bird gotta fly
Man gotta ask himself why, why, why?
Fish gotta sleep
Bird gotta land
Man gotta tell himself he understand.
-Jamaican proverb.
I am at heart a three dimensional artist, and this is the reason I love using glass as my medium. While I spend a great deal of time and toil painting two-dimensional images on my glass pieces, the clear glass transmits these images through itself, allowing me to turn an object of surfaces into an object with both surfaces and an interior.
My pieces are three-dimensional narratives that are meant to be “grocked” (the term Robert Heinlein coined to express complete and immediate understanding) as opposed to “understood”. Unlike a written narrative, where a linear progression of words slowly brings the reader to the story and ultimately to an understanding, my sculptures present an entire narrative experience in a unique and more immediate visual format. To me this is the beauty and allure of sculpture.
In my pieces these images become truly grockable conceptions that burst into our consciousness and allow us to “understand” the original thought. Like dreams, they contain within them all the contradictions of wholeness. They combine reason with un-reason, form with formlessness and comprehension with the incomprehensible. And much as we like to decipher our dreams, analyzing the bizarre juxtaposition of images and events into understandable segments, all we really accomplish is to separate an incomprehensible whole into bite size segments of understanding. But the dream is in its most complete form before we analyze it; it wants us to be mystified and awed.
This then is the key to deciphering my pieces. They are in their most complete form before the analysis begins. But like a dream, you are drawn in to discover the many images and shapes whose strange juxtapositions and relationships evoke thoughts, feelings and even memories.
The images and forms I use are both archetypal and personal, iconographic and idiosyncratic. This is after all how we experience life, incorporating the largest conception of creation, a god concept, down through the cosmological, into the iconographic, then the identity markers of nationality, religion, gender and finally to the uniquely personal and mundane. Our moment-to-moment experience of being depends on where we place the emphasis on this continuum. One thing is certain, the more our experience feels like awe and incomprehension, the closer we are to the “god” end of the continuum!
I give my pieces titles, mostly because I don’t care for art that’s labeled “untitled”. To me that’s like naming your baby “no-name”. My pieces are corporeal and thus deserve a title. But this title is only a descriptor, not the narrative itself. My pieces are meant to allow each viewer to analyze and experience the pieces for themselves, and to come up with their own “understanding”, to discover their own meanings in each piece.