Then There Is Time

 

My interest in Cubism isn’t only about multiple viewpoints. Perception continually changes. We look again, attention shifts, memory intervenes, and the brain updates its interpretation. A viewer can see despair in a portrait today and hope tomorrow. So a painting isn’t just completed differently by different people, it can be completed differently by the same person at different moments.

 

We don’t simply see what is there. We construct what we see and that construction changes with who we are, what we have experienced and when we are looking.

 

Cubism, Perception and Time

 

Cubism opened a door that contemporary neuroscience has helped us understand in new ways. Through observation and experimentation, the Cubists challenged the idea that vision is a simple recording of the world. Their work anticipated an understanding of perception as something active - shaped by attention, memory, experience and time.

 

Cézanne spoke of seeking *la vérité en peinture*—“the truth in painting.” That truth did not lie in the optical illusion of linear perspective. Instead, he translated the three-dimensional world into interlocking planes of color and form, suggesting the experience of seeing as the eyes move through the world rather than from a single fixed viewpoint. His paintings suggest not simply a frozen instant, but an accumulated experience of seeing. From this conceptual foundation, Cubism emerged.

 

The early Cubists pursued a greater or essential reality. They explored the fourth dimension and forms reconstituted through successive views rather than captured from a single fixed position. To me, the fourth dimension is time - the continuous merging of present perception with memory, made visible through change.

 

In this search, the Cubists abandoned linear perspective and conventional shadows, compressed foreground and background into shallow geometric space, introduced fragments through collage, reduced color to emphasize structure, and analyzed forms from multiple viewpoints before reassembling them into a unified image.

 

For me, Cubism is ultimately a way of understanding perception. Its enduring insight is that introducing time into painting brings the image closer to the way we actually experience reality.

 

How These Ideas Shape My Painting

 

I often combine multiple viewpoints within a single face. Slight misalignments, inconsistent lighting, out-of-focus elements and subtly different expressions coexist within the same portrait.

 

I combine flat and dimensional space, bringing some elements of the background forward while allowing others to retain depth. I keep shadows and highlights, but place them not necessarily where light would fall in a single instant, but where they strengthen the composition and suggest different moments in time.

 

I use a limited palette, often enhanced with metallic and iridescent colors that change with lighting and angle of view.

 

Ambiguity is central to this process. It invites viewers to slow down, question what they are seeing and complete the image with an internally constructed representation and narrative shaped by their own memories, experiences and state of mind.

 

Every portrait begins with a single face, an ambiguous expression, a direct shared gaze, an uncertain context and a few naturalistic cues.

 

Then There Are the Eyes

 

If I engage you with the eyes, I can work more freely everywhere else. Some features are carefully rendered while others dissolve into gesture, marks or abstraction. Your brain assembles these fragments into a coherent face, supplying information I have intentionally left unresolved.

 

My portraits are not images to be decoded but collaborations between me and the viewer, mediated by perception. In many ways, viewers can complete the painting more convincingly than I ever could. They bring their own memories, experiences, emotions and personal narratives to the image, constructing a reality uniquely their own.

 

My Job Is To Provide the Cues That Make It Happen

 

I use these ideas not as an homage to Cubism, but in service of my own mission. My portraits explore substance use disorder, stigma and hope. I want my art to be not simply something to observe, but something to experience.

 

Each viewer leaves with a different painting because each viewer brings a different mind.

 

Process and Media

 

I paint both with acrylic paint on canvas and digitally with my iPad. My digital-hybrid paintings combine traditional painting, digital drawing and photographic manipulation.

 

Each digital-hybrid begins with a high-resolution image of one of my large-scale, unfinished acrylic-on-canvas paintings. I transfer the image to my iPad, where I continue to draw and build layers of marks and graphic elements. Using photographic tools, I dodge, burn, saturate, resize and transform the image, creating a new original work entirely by my hand. These pieces are displayed on monitors, projected at theater scale, or printed on a variety of media including dye sublimation on aluminum.

 

Accidents and experiments are central to my process. A drip may be random; what I do with it is not. I work freely, observing and exploiting unexpected effects, turning problems into possibilities. Each painting becomes a series of fresh starts- a surface repeatedly disrupted and rebuilt. My expectation of the image evolves as the painting evolves.

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