paintings


Architecture rests on intellectual as well as material foundations. _cr
s u r f a c e _7 A R C H I T E C T __F I G U R E | F I E L D P A I N T I N G S

The basis of my research and my intellectual production has its secret in the uninterrupted practice of painting. _Le Corbusier
Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. _ Robert Motherwell

As with Cézanne at the turn of the 19th century -- and in the tradition of architect-painters Le Corbusier and Terragni in the early part of the 20th century -- my paintings represent research into the problem of form. This research centers on (1) plastic values or devices, including the dialectical relationships of plane and line, surface and depth, center and edge, and solid and void (i.e., figure/ground or figure/field -- Le Corbusier referred to this fundamental formal/spatial relationship as "empty/full"); and (2) retinal devices, including chromatic and textural attributes of paint itself. Ultimately, these paintings, which are intended as aesthetic products in their own right, represent a process of intellectual transformation -- they are preparatory architectural visual studies in anticipation of the realization of an advanced architecture. And, if the tension betweeen abstraction and figuration is the radical basis of their existence -- they are simultaneously abstract studies of the theme of the rectangle and yet inseparable from allusions to windows (the vertical field) and maps and landscape (the horizontal field); inseparable, that is, from the implied dialectic between "sight" and "site" -- their visual and cognitive structure exists under the larger rubric of what I call the phenomenal chess game of Move and Meaning.