Waves of Return of Waves

In 2018, I returned to painting after a twenty-five year hiatus. A bit later in 2023, I began moving from New York City to western Massachusetts, an area where I attended college and where my family had property until the early 2000s. This past summer brought another return—for the first time in roughly twenty years, I began playing music again. My current life in 2026 has strong reverberations from when I was a student at Hampshire College in the 1990s. While a lot has changed both personally and globally, I never would have expected these things to resurface and be actualized. Waves have been a recurring motif in my work, and lately, the river has been entering it as well. My current studio has a wide view of a small river, unlike my previous studio in Brooklyn which overlooked a busy avenue. The distracting sounds of traffic and street disputes have been replaced by a huge sycamore tree and occasional sightings of beavers and mergansers. During summer months I routinely slip in for swims. Regardless of the season or time of day, the river is the main feature when I look out my studio windows. Part of its appearance in the work has to do with the ergonomics of handling paint with a flat brush, but mostly it reflects my daily immersion in this landscape. Now that I live and work in an area replete with rivers and 19th-century mill buildings, I am resetting my nervous system through such different stimuli. My work exists in the space between formal, geometric abstraction and intuitive lyricism. Each painting follows its own logic, or intuition, which guides but doesn't predetermine its resolution. Some paintings start and end in the realm of non-narrative, geometric abstraction. Others veer off into an unscripted world of recognizable forms and autobiographical references. Both are legitimate, but I find the latter more compelling due to the surprise of layered meanings. Initially, I didn't know how to accept or integrate lyrical narratives into a purist approach to formal abstraction. It felt vulnerable, vexing—but it's become central to how I work now. As a musician trained outside of academic contexts, primarily through punk and art rock, the guitar is the instrument I have clocked the most hours playing. When playing an electric guitar, my go-to effect is tremolo (or vibrato). With the intensity potentiometer set at 10 and the speed at 4, the tremolo effect disrupts the straight-forwardness of the present tense and clarity of linear space by bending the waveforms into more pronounced waves. A remote, non-space—an ethereal net becomes present. It has a similar transportive quality to when the late afternoon or early evening sun reflects off the river and up onto the ten-foot high studio ceiling. Light patterns softly vibrate, glowing down from above. Like the sonic effect of a pulsating note or chord, the character of space and psychology of the perceiver is transformed— dislodged into the immersion of currents. Non-dogmatic practices and chance outcomes are a big part of why I spend time in a room by myself making work. When I paint, I am mostly trying to have an intuitive, material endeavor, but sometimes autobiographical associations emerge. Small and large cycles provide opportunities for themes to repeat, and I'm learning to welcome rather than resist what returns.