COMING SOON

I paint with smoke. Fumage - a technique the Surrealists prized as a doorway to the unconscious - means passing an open flame beneath the picture surface and letting lampblack stream into the paint. In alchemy this is the nigredo, the first operation, in which matter is burned and blackened before it can be transformed.

I can guide the flame, but not the swirling plume of smoke. Its turbulence leaves forms I could never design: figures, faces and landscapes that seem to surface rather than be consciously made. Chance becomes a way of letting images rise from below intention. James Hillman taught that the psyche speaks in images, and that we should stay with them before rushing to explain them. What appears in the lampblack is archetypal before it is personal.

Smoke Pixels is a series of uniform panels. Each one is unique, and each is signed, dated, titled and numbered. A pixel suggests control, but smoke resists it. The panels can be arranged into constellations of any size or shape, and each arrangement makes a new work. Duchamp said the spectator completes the work, and here the spectator literally does.

Carbon is the defining material of our age, the residue of a combustion we have not learned to contain. Alchemy promised that blackened matter could be redeemed. Smoke Pixels breaks that promise into pieces you can hold.