I create abstract and whimsical images in my art. My art serves as personal commentary on musical and cultural celebration inspired by life and experiences. I often explore the artistic nature of music (especially Jazz), and personal memory in my art. Focusing mainly on the movement, rhythm, and delight of music and life. I examine the play and impact of music on my personal beliefs and life experiences. In my 'Jazz Abstract Series,' I utilize my artistic nature as a musician and imagination as a visual artist to explore the complexities and amusements of the creative world. The intent of this series is to look at the dimensions, substance and fundamental nature of musical and visual creative expression in a new way. I try to construct and create works as both totally musical and visual works that capture the essence and excitement I feel as I experience Jazz music. They are part of a multifaceted personal landscape that I see as an essential part of my continued development as an artist, musician, teacher, and human being.
Art and music becomes an empowering and valuable way of recognizing the possibilities I hold within to develop as a person and a man. The flow if I making art give me life and I do this by listening to the jazz sounds. The beats move to a higher level in art, not just in painting but through color too. Like that sounds of the bass, and the smooth sounds of the sax. These jazz sounds drive me to an art level that makes me soar. I test myself with colors to manipulate different styles and come up with big surprises. In these works, I seek to explore the different methods of visual perception, which exist just beneath the surface of our common visual reality. I look at reflections, shadows, light patterns and negative spaces, which are all a part of our everyday visual experience, yet remain for the most part, ignored. I choose to focus on these entities as my subject matter, making them the main characters in their own stories.
Obviously they are fictionalized to some extent, as no shadow is really that sharply defined and no negative space so playfully colored. However, by exaggerating their details, I hope to show how beautifully striking these marvels of nature can be, if one only takes time to look at them. To me, negative space, light patterns and shadows are just as important as the physical space they inhabit. If we are looking around us, our eyes cannot feel the difference between what is physical and what is intangible. It is only because we have been trained all our lives to know that we can put our hand through a shadow but not a wall that we ascribe a certain importance to the wall and not the shadow.
In a painting, a shadow haste same tangibility as a wall, no matter how dexterously an artist creates an illusion with paint. Shadows and walls are made of the same substance. As to how these subjects are portrayed, I have become more and more interested in their formal elements, such as their geometrical shapes and patterns. I have also become increasingly interested in color and have shifted completely away from naturalistic color towards very bright, unnatural colors. In most of the paintings, especially the more recent ones, I have used color as a means of expressing light. However, each painting is completely different in its own right, with its own ideas and type of abstraction. I hope that some of the intentions I have expressed here have been achieved in these works.