Abstract Art
Abstract Artwork 2008-2022
Automatic Doodles
During the Covid-19 pandemic I would chat with friends on the phone about their lives. Though I was present and engaged in these conversations, my hands would often find something to do on their own, producing small and large drawings with any tools lying close. I spent a couple days collaging these scribbles into big drawings. One of the themes in my art is the way that all stories and myths are connected to gesture. The same thing that compels a kid to make a mark on a piece of paper shapes the narratives that frame our experience.
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Abstract Paintings
These paintings are inspired by books, feelings, stories, relationships, and concurrent projects.
This is about the relationship between part and whole. The word "Synechdoche" is defined as the use of the part to describe the whole, or vice versa. For example: "The captain commands 100 sails," where the word "sails" is used instad of "ships." or "Cleveland won by 10 runs" where Cleveland is used to refer to the baseball team rather than the entire city. In this drawing, each of the color swatches represents something about nature/the world, speaking about something universal. But converseley, as a whole they are only a small part of experience/perception of color.
"This drawing is inspired by the description of The creation of Durga the demon slayer in the Puranas. ""The devas saw there a concentration of light like a mountain blazing, pervading everything with its flames. Then that unique light, produced from the bodies of all the devas, pervading the three worlds with its luster, combined into one and became a female form."" "
Inspired by the story "The Country of The Blind" by H.G. Wells, this drawing describes a moment where the main character falls into a canyon where he is trapped with a population of blind humans isloated from the rest of the world. It represents the feeling of falling into an unexpected life-changing predicament. And looking back up at where you thought you stood before. Kind of like a failed leap of faith. But you can see words from the story peeking out in the top right corner, maybe my way out is through introspection.
This piece shows a somewhat accidental use of frisket - a translucent material sticky on one side designed for stencils. I drew on the frisket, then sliced it up and placed it on 18x24 inch thick paper. After that I drew over the frisket with charcoal and was happy to see the borders of the frisket appear underneath the drawing. So there are 3 layers of drawings in one.
This is a storyboard from an animation I was working on about fibroblasts being used to generate artificial vasculature. As you can see there’s a tension between the task of conveying the science and the desire to create something beautiful! I think we have a natural desire to “decorate,” embellish, dramatize and share our inner vision in our communcation. Maybe this impulse (or compulsion) is one of the forces behind the development of language and visual culture.
An abstract painting made in ink on newsprint - what does it make you think of? My favorite painters include Willem de Kooning, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich. All of these painters engage the question of the nature of abstraction and gesture. Can we make art outside of representation? Or does our cultural context always leave a mark on our work?
While making this painting I held the brush more like a broom than a paintbrush, and let the water run out until it became dry. Some of the smaller elements like the circles are in reference to the ocean, sand, nature.
This drawing is inspired by the story of Hagar and Ishmael as described in the Old Testament. Hagar is an egyptian slave cast out into the desert where she searches for water with her son. These infinity-like shapes are derived from the ridges on the tops of sand dunes in the horizon. The way they float upwards represents Hagar's faith in the face of almost certain death. These wound-like apertures allude to the pitfalls of faith, the possiblity of self harm. The scribbles dance the line between.
This is an abstract representation of an Ocotillo patch in Joshua tree. The lines are derived from the desert landscape. I find when I'm in Joshua tree the zig-zagging patterns on the surfaces of the plants flow into the tumbling debris, the rocks, the hills, the horizon and atmosphere.
This painting is about weight and mass. It's two pages glued together. The way the top paper is torn back is some kind of obtuse reference to the way that flyers aggregate on telephone poles, building and getting torn off, leaving little scraps of color near the staples. And similarly how landmass aggregates, erodes, clumps, calves, collapses. And this particular form is about cities, buildings, architecture.
This is one of two images I painted using a method of spontaneity, organizing shapes just as they popped into my head. I repreated the exercise later with the same brush and colors. I'm pleasently surprised that while the two paintings are almost completly different, they also look almost identical.
This is a storyboard from an animation I was working on about fibroblasts being used to generate artificial vasculature. As you can see there’s a tension between the task of conveying the science and the desire to create something beautiful! I think we have a natural desire to “decorate,” embellish, dramatize and share our inner vision in our communcation. Maybe this impulse (or compulsion) is one of the forces behind the development of language and visual culture.
This is an expressive sketch that came out of some ideation around a logo animation for a company that makes inverters for solar energy production. Satcon Solar. The idea of these little blocks stuck in my head for weeks after I spent countless hours coding the intricate motion of cubes in Maya.
This is a storyboard from an animation I was working on about fibroblasts being used to generate artificial vasculature. As you can see there’s a tension between the task of conveying the science and the desire to create something beautiful! I think we have a natural desire to “decorate,” embellish, dramatize and share our inner vision in our communication. Maybe this impulse (or compulsion) is one of the forces behind the development of language and visual culture.
This is a painting I made on my floor with a ex right before we broke up. I filled up two empty yogurt cups with water and spilled printer toner onto the palette. We used housepaint brushes.
An abstract image loosely inspired by deep sea caves. I spilled salt on the watercolor to create patterns and shapes.
This is a peculiar collage of drawings and processes I was testing on a single sheet of newsprint lying by my desk during grad school thesis work. I has some kind of peculiar stencil I was working with, probably trying to reduce the bleed from under the acrylic. There's also a snippet of a scene from a story with an environment you can see sketched in pencil in the center.
This is a drawing in a series about the ways that animation changed American visual language. Norman Klein explains an interesting idea in his book "7 Minutes" about how the use of cells to produce animation created a new emphasis on contour instead of shading. When you have to continually redraw an image and create the illusion of motion, you end up creating "ideograms," or simplified shapes with smoother edges. This style is instantly recognizable, and interestingly began to dominate graphic culture in patches through the 20s.
There's paint on either side of the tracing paper, so you can see through it, but I didn't trace from anything.. but for some reason I liked the way that you can see paint on both sides of the image. I also remember at the time I had zero furniture except a mattress on the floor and a large cardboard box I had flattened and used as a painting surface.
This is part of a series of drawings about the Ganges river, starting with a figure descending to Earth into Siva's matted locks of hair. The form started as a woman with an arched back drawn with kinetic circles, but then dissolved into a abstract gesture.
This is a drawing in a series about the ways that animation changed American visual language. Norman Klein explains an interesting idea in his book "7 Minutes" about how the use of cells to produce animation created a new emphasis on contour instead of shading. When you have to continually redraw an image and create the illusion of motion, you end up creating "ideograms," or simplified shapes with smoother edges. This style is instantly recognizable, and interestingly began to dominate graphic culture in patches through the 20s.
I first heard about the collective "Ant Farm" in undergrad - a group of artists and architects formed in 1968 who wanted to craft a new dialogue around how architecture is made and where it goes. Among other projects they are famous for traveling with giant inflatable buildings around the country. You could basically call them extremely fancy tents I suppose. This drawing is an idea for a giant inflatable with courtyards.
This sketch is about relationships - the floaty uncomfortable feeling you get when someone is about to flake on you, leave you feeling a little foolish and a little more guarded, bitter. There's some thrill in this feeling, I know we take sick pleasure in it. And it's just a natural part of the human condition! But avoiding this feeling leads us into some dark places.
The wavy and dotted lines are following the rhythms and horn lines in Willie Bobo's "Spanish Grease" from 1965. There are also pieces of cityscape, highways, streets.
A drawing about language. There's paint on either side of the tracing paper, so you can see through it. Of course I didn't trace from anything.. but for some reason I liked the way that you can see paint on both sides of the image. I also remember at the time I had zero furniture except a mattress on the floor and a large cardboard box I had flattened and used as a painting surface.
A stream of consciousness painting about broken frames, oil spills, floating petals, construction material, floating oil, tadpoles.
These abstract works are inspired by the story of Hagar and Ishmael as described in the Old Testament. Hagar is an egyptian slave cast out into the desert where she searches for water with her son. These infinity-like shapes are derived from the ridges on the tops of sand dunes in the horizon. The way they float upwards represents Hagar's faith in the face of almost certain death. These wound-like apertures allude to the pitfalls of faith, the possibilty of self harm. The scribbles dance the line between.
This drawing is one of many mostly about a repeated motion. The shape and joint of my wrist itself generating forms that can become a texture or have new meaning that emerges from the repetitve action. In this case the shape of the paper affects the final form as well.
Feeling a little squished.
This is part of a series of drawings about the Ganges river, starting with a figure descending to Earth into matted locks of hair. The figurative form dissolves into an abstract gesture echoing the figure.
This image is about the similarities between human vasculature and tissue, and other similar systems of transportation and boundary. For example, highways, rivers, cities, textiles, trees. It recalls a passage from Toyo Ito's "Tarzan's in the Media Forest" that I love about Juan O' Gorman: "The two worlds that Juan O'Gorman symbolically depicted during the course of his single life represent two extremes of his own body image. These are the body as a concept, and the living body. The former is an unnnatural body that aims at a consciously conceived abstract, utopian world, the latter is a natural body that extends to the traditions of ancient Mexico. People of every era constantly try to fix within their dwelling spaces those memories of the land that are etched into their flesh. These are not merely personal memories, but a spatialisation of the memories of a family or regional group. Houses that are built up in such a way, across generations of struggle with the violence of the natural world, become like a skin that extends the physical bodies of the people."
