Strata Gallery
After more than two decades of painting, I have come to understand the ebb and flow of creating work in the quiet of a studio. From 2001-2005, I worked on a series titled Strata. This series grew out of a deafening silence that I felt after the Twin Towers went down. My world, our world stopped. The studio went silent. I stripped my work of all imagery, and began to paint what I like to think of as chants -- a spiritual beginning. One note, one color, one strip. If I painted anything that I thought was too precious or beautiful, I stripped it away. Was it missed? Was it there? This is the beginning from which the Strata series has evolved over five years. Day by day the monumental and the precious are wrapped together, forming a linkage, however fleeting. For this series I worked on honey-combed aluminum panels. I built up the surface with dense layers of paint and then section-by-section sanded, drilled, and scraped it away. The painted surfaces feel and look like leather or the bark of a tree -- in contrast to the distressed etched portions or the polished look of a patina left behind.