The discipline required for complex oil paintings results in a build-up of physical and artistic tension that I release by turning to work on my Concatenations.  Concatenations are more purely expressive and care-free works, often with whimsical titles that reveal an intellectual dimension to these apparently simple works.  Concatenation has become an element of my framing convention, rather than a discrete form.

The difference in planning works when undertaking them in oils as opposed to acrylic is substantial.  Put simply, oils require more thoughtful preparation and application and take longer to dry, so most contemporary artists eschew the more traditional oil formulations in favor of the large variety of acrylic preparations and mediums widely available that allow a spontaneous and gestural style of painting that is more glib.  A greater output of works may be obtained by the artist in any given amount of time with a great deal less bother.  When I began painting I used acrylics and other water-media, but eventually found them to be less true to color over time and more difficult to use in acheiving the effects of depth I sought to create.  There is a profound tactile difference between the two media, and I much prefer oils in this regard. Also, my earlier acrylic and mixed-media works were frequently applied to grounds scavenged through selective dumpster diving in the cities of the American Pacific Northwest, but the chemistry of traditional oil mediums demand more refined and stable grounds as well as more refined technique.  In order to ease my transition to oils from acrylics I used proprietary Alkyd mediums which improve drying times at the expense of some mild yellowing and reduce the need for a careful cartesian approach to the construction of the paint film.  When I work on large grounds with relatively small marks, my usual programmatic approach means that by the time I complete one layer of marks in a particular color, the portion of the painting where I began the layer is dry allowing me to begin the next layer immediately. On smaller grounds this is not necessarily true, and in order to be able to paint daily I undertake to have several smaller, often associated works underway. At first these works would be in acrylic, but as I depleted my stock of acrylic paints and mediums I began to execute these secondary works in oils.  I have reached a stage where I like to maintain a single, large, complex canvas as a primary task and surround it with a cluster of satellite works wherein I explore ideas for the larger work in a similar palette, but without the constraints a master work produces. 

Simplexity mimics the unconscious evolution that powers self-organization through simple rules and feedback from which complexity spontaneously emerges.
 
I chose the lens to be the fundamental, self-replicating element in this system of marks.  Focus on any randomly chosen nexus of simplexity lenses and you will see the center of a roughly spherical, homogenous and isotropic structure.  Broaden your gaze and observe self-similarity of form and chroma in all directions from the given nexus.  This is achieved through the repeated application of simple rules to the design and orientation of the lenses.  A computer can achieve a comparable effect quickly, but it will lack the underlying premise of simplexity; that repeated marks or elements must have random mutations.  Locus-Focus, or the perceptual state-of-the-ground and the artist’s ability-to-respond provide the interactive feedback mechanism. As mutations are generated they are sustained through the feedback mechanism to favor optimal optical mix and other perceived forms of visual organization defined by media and format.
 
The act of painting such a work is an exercise in spontaneous pattern formation where the most thought goes into the moment of conception, but some thought is measured out relatively equally across the entire life of the work.  I find this more satisfying than laboring long to perfect an aging thought.
 
The intellectual basis for the Simplexity series of paintings has been thoughts manifested from Turings theories of self-organization in biology, the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction in chemistry, and self-similarity as described by Mandelbrot.  Mix these with a healthy dose of non-Aristotelian systems, general semantics from Korzybski and a measure of quantum vacuum zero point energy from my years in nuclear power and the Simplexity series will be decoded for you.

My earliest use of the term State Of The Art referred to an early work from my time in Seattle.  I began the work one morning with dragons drawn in condensation on my rear patio window beside where I sat in sad Rattan with a cup of tea in a steamy space above the alley in the University District.  My use of the term today refers to those works that are deeply considered and carefully executed from beginning to end.  I do not allow limitations to interfere with their completion.  State of the Art paintings are interspersed throughout my body of work, and always represent the height of my skill at that moment.

Link to latest state of the art painting:  M-Brane Theory

Blue Art is not about human sexuality alone.  Yes, there is ambiguity in this series; that is a huge part of what I do. These paintings are about changing attitudes of sexuality versus the truth of it juxtaposed with similar observations about other aspects of our culture.  Perception versus reality.  But this series' genesis traces back to my reaction to an exploitive promoter and his ill-informed classification of my work, over simply, as pop art based entirely upon his superficial survey of the visual effects.  I ENJOY BEING PAINTERLY; I refuse to "humble" myself into dreary posterism.  Emotional reaction this strong stimulated my examination of the theoretical diversion of American aesthetic from European traditions.  Where else has the local political and cultural climate influencing my work existed and where would it place me in painting's legacy?  Surely not within pop art.  This drove me to look at Weimar Berlin, the birth of Dada and the heyday German Expressionism.  The participation of so many Berliners in the sex trade and the accessibility of sexual imagery in the publications and entertainments of the time gave rise to a fundamentalism affecting all aspects of daily life.  I was alarmed by the growing presence of socio-political fundamentalism in the culture of early 21st century America.  So, I looked to the popular domain for images of figures to pirate.  I chose sexual imagery because of the prevalence of eroticism in Weimar art imagery and its prevalence in my time.  80% of all web traffic is pornography.  Google innocuous terms and you are still almost certain to get porn in the search results.  Every ten-year-old boy on the planet has a visual reference for every conceivable sexual act.  I chose photos to draw from for a variety of reasons, one of which was the tedium of figure sessions.  I can copy even a complex photo to a small ground in a day or less well enough to act as a guide for the layers of paint to come after.  So, I picked out some dirty little pictures which popped up when I went looking with everyday words, and I have been trying to make art instead of just dirty little paintings.  I took popular images as Warhol did but rather than simplify them to reproducible graphics, I made the images visually, symbolically and metaphorically layered.  What began as a rebuke of an ill fitting categorization became the next arena for the exploration and evolution of technique within my process.

Blue Art Gallery