The reference photographs for these paintings were created by tracking various light sources within a moving frame at long shutter speeds, resulting in heavily abstracted photographic impressions that then get "photo-realistically" rendered in oil on panel. This liminal modality of representation—a sort of musical inversion of the classical trompe l'oeil—disrupts conventional understanding (in spite of its deeply conventional subject). As a result, the ideas we have about what we see become increasingly fraught by a Möbius loop of visual code-switching, probing our intuition of form, value and time out to the very edge of our visual imagination.

Within the science of light, of course, lies a similar ontological knot: not only do we observe that its nature appears to be two things at once, but the more we try to “know” or measure it in one way, the less capable we become of doing so in another.

The wondrous confusion we experience in response to these ineffable images reifies our human affair with light, provoking an instinctive desire for clarity and identification while at the very same time refusing to award these things to our grasping mind.

-2024