Grayscale / Urban Sequences
This body of work is an intersection of obsessive line drawing and reductive painting methods. With limited palette ranges, most often in gray-scale or simple monochromes, these compositions deliver a formal exploration of line, shape, and form while delving into the sphere of subjective personal experience.
Each piece is a composite of many fleeting moments documented by lines and marks and records the passage of time and movement. Some marks are very deliberate and considered while others are more intuitively sensed. Fragments of architecture, allusions to landscape and references to the human body suggest the artist’s engagement with the world around us. Repetitive lines, patterns and abstracted shapes evoke the internal and contemplative realities that lie just beneath the surface of our everyday lives.
I made the structural drawings of these compositions in situ in Chicago over the course of several years riding on public transportation while looking at the architecture, graffiti, people and natural environs of the city. The grid-like installation mediates the viewer’s experience of the paintings, reflecting the tension between Chicago’s extensive civic planning and the inevitable sprawl of its inhabitants.
