The last few weeks in the studio have been a steady spill of shapes, fragments and hybrid materials that seem to be building their own vocabulary while I just try to keep up. I have been moving between paper / foam core relief sculptures, layered paintings with applied assemblage pieces, digital mashups and strange photo composites with the same kind of rhythm you get when you walk through three different neighborhoods but they somehow still connect.
The work keeps showing me that every medium I touch is part of one continuum.
“Mechanics”, 2025, Acrylic on Wood Panel with painted assemblage composition, 11 inches X 14 inches
The new relief paintings are getting bolder. Can they become larger? Is this the next breakthrough? Hmmm, the forms keep stacking and bending into each other like modular characters that want to climb off the surface. I am staying committed to the cut paper and foam core pieces because they let me sculpt the composition before the color comes in. The color then becomes something like a second personality that wraps around the structure. This new batch leans into saturated fields of red, purple and orange with sharp contrasts and soft gradients living together. The pieces feel alive, like they are preparing to animate themselves when no one is looking.
“The Animated 817 Pause”, 2025, Acrylic on Wood Panel with painted assemblage composition, 11 inches X 14 inches
“Still but Not”, 2025, Acrylic on Wood Panel with painted assemblage composition, 11 inches X 14 inches
“Gazing in Pixel Reliefs”, 2025, Acrylic & digital print relief collage on Wood Panel, 11 inches X 14 inches
At the same time I have been pulling ideas from earlier digital work and remixing them into new composites. The pixel portrait experiments are returning as large bursts of texture and noise layered over the painted structures. There is something satisfying about seeing a hyper digital fragment hovering over something made entirely by hand. The tension between the two feels like the real subject. It becomes a conversation about memory, identity and the way images mutate when they move between mediums.
“The Distance is Textured”, 2025, Digital Illustration, 12 inches X 15 inches
“The Destination is Layered”, 2025, Digital Illustration, 12 inches X 15 inches
The “train” series continues to evolve. I keep diving back into those long perspectives and letting the environment distort into graphic abstractions. The latest versions bring in more color interruptions and glitch textures. They sit somewhere between a landscape, a dream sequence and a transit hallucination. I have spent a ton of time in transit, and it fuels ideas, always departing and arriving, the loop continues, The more I push them the more they tilt into a surreal place that feels natural to me.
“The Arrivals are Waves”, 2025, Digital Illustration, 12 inches X 15 inches
“B-Boy”, 2025, Cut paper Wall relief, 50 inches X 18 inches
I have also been continuing to push on the tall standing figures cut from paper, cardboard and foam core. After completing that big series for the Brooklyn Wine Company window displays I had to keep going! These pieces continue to function like “hieroglyphic bodies”. Each shape reads as a limb, a gesture or a piece of armor, and the full figure becomes a stack of stories told through contours. I like how quiet they are. They feel ancient and futuristic at the same time. They continue to be derived from early 1980’s B-Boy and B-Girl character that inspired me during that time, paying homage to 1980’s NYC graffiti and breakin’ culture.
“B-Girl”, 2025, Oil stick & acrylic, painted cut cardboard assemblage, Wall relief, 50 inches X 18 inches
“The Next Landscape”, 2025, Digital Illustration, 14 inches X 18 inches
The newest “digital tree” form might be the beginning of a new series. It shares a likeness to the portrait above: “The Distance is Textured”, and it showed up one night like a dream made of gold foil and folded paper. I followed it and let it stand in an empty field of those violet textures. It has that odd quality of being both natural and synthetic, which is exactly the tension I wanted. Part of me wants to animate it and the other part wants to wait and look more before giving into that impulse.
“An Electronic Snippet of Suchness”, 2025, Animated GIF, 16 inches X 12 inches
All of these works share one thing. They are portals. They each come from the same internal language that has been growing for decades, but the forms are mutating faster and faster than usual right now. I am paying attention. I am documenting everything. I am following the parts of the process that feel inevitable.
More soon. The studio wants to keep talking..
