I first began to appreciate the beauty of static while listening to number stations. Listening to number stations involves hearing a lot of static—static typical of the short-wave spectrum, static between stations, and static while waiting for the next transmission. With so much static, the mind sharpens over time. A heightened level of concentration and openness emerges.
It becomes a kind of meditation. In the random clicks and pops, faint tones start to form. Voices become discernible, though not fully understood. Information is there, hovering just beyond reach.
Static is also part of my everyday life due to my tinnitus. I hear constant static, a perpetual hissing—twenty-four hours a day, every day. There is no escape from it. In this way, I am always sifting through information in the static, whether I am listening or thinking.
These threads—static as both a personal and philosophical experience—have fueled this new series of paintings. For the past twelve months, my studio practice has been consumed by this exploration. ‘By static. This is also the catalyst of my exploration into other trajectories of expression, including media native to the realm of electromagnetic static itself.
Notes about my painting process:
Most of the volcanic rock that I use comes from the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, near the Navajo Nation. It’s a felsic magma deposit that is 250-300 million years old.
It is mined for industrial purposes and normally shipped by train-car load. The nice ladies working in the offices at the mine have it sorted by grain size and shipped to me in five-gallon buckets.
Over years of working with this material, I’ve discovered ways of making the grains of the rock accept a pigment.
Creating a soup of pigments and other chemicals, I make batches of colored rock by the gallon.
If you were to visit my studio, you’d see scores of plastic bins, each filled with gravel of different colors and grain sizes.
In my most recent work, I’m first casting the pigmented volcanic rock into shapes, which are later arranged and attached to the canvas.
Because the gravel is sticky with polymer emulsion, most of the painting is done with the canvas in a horizontal position. With larger paintings, I hang from the ceiling above the canvas as I work to reach the entire surface.