Artist’s statement

THRESHOLDS:

These paintings have taken shape over many months. I have always found inspiration in the open horizons and skies of our western landscapes. In each painting, I try to distill an experience, whether lived or a remnant of a dream world. Each of these paintings offers you a threshold, an invitation into an abstract space where you meet an expression of mountains, sky, flowers, trees and water through space and color. While I hope to capture that fresh quality of just waking, often it is through the process of painting that the piece starts to talk back and guide me.  I love the vivid brilliant colors of acrylic paint, and I add metallic leaf to create an intrinsic glow, capture light and reflect it back. Then it seems that the threshold opens both ways and gives each painting its own voice.

My work is signed with my dharma name, “Koku,” which means “vast, empty sky”…the place where paintings come from.

PHOTOGRAPHIC MEDIA:

These pieces (Transformed Life) are based on 16mm film shot over 45 years ago; some of them on black and white film hand developed and stained. Strips of film are scanned using a high resolution flat bed scanner to rescue individual frames which are then arranged in photoshop before printing. The images are stacked in vertical columns so that each piece can be read through time from upper left to lower right. Each image is a distinct separate photograph and since 16 mm film runs at 24 frames a second, each represents 1/24th second of life preserved and yet transformed. This transformation may also include the color modifications which creates the poignancy and mood of each piece.