Title: Synthetic Wave Form - Shellac Song V
Year: 2022
Size: 16" x 20"
Technique: Encaustic mixed media panting and animation graphics

From the time of my earliest memories, I’ve been compelled to create art and music, and the two expressions have always been intertwined. Time evaporates when I’m immersed in the act of creating art and no other work serves to mesmerize me in this way. As a swing jazz guitarist with synesthesia, the music I hear and play is accompanied by dancing lights of color that flash across my field of vision. Accordingly, I seek to recreate musical -like happenings in my abstractions: a conceptual expression similarly explored by artists of personal influence, such as Nam June Paik, Joan Jonas, and Laurie Anderson, as well as earlier conveyors of musical imagery including Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee.

When playing music, my improvisational approach is to weave together theoretical ideas with visual guides as superimposed across my fretboard in maps of note patterns. They are quick, visual echoes that feel like pops of magic from some unknown source. In my most recent series of abstract paintings, "Sweet Nothings”, "INcision", and "Shellac Songs", I aim to communicate this relationship between audio and visual perceptions.
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Further reflecting on my personal connection between image and sound through the abstraction process, in jazz improvisation, one either holds predictably within the key center and melodic interplay, or allows for the lead-line to stray beyond the expected framework. Note by note, each musical decision coalesces into one complete form in its standard 16-bar frame, the way each touch of pigment builds a painting. In an exploration toward mimicking my experience of jazz improvisations in visual art, I allow every artistic choice to delicately balance between either intent: to reformulate, or passive yielding: to the existing context. The decision to submit or take control influences how each color form connect by their cell-like frames or don't connect at all.