 Gonna Hear Electric Music (solid walls of sound)
Came back to the abstract this summer. Painted it all to a solid backbeat of new hip hop from A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul. Same as abstract artists Mondrian or Stuart Davis drew inspiration from jazz, I've been painting to densely layered rap rhythms. To honor that the titles of some of this new work are pulled from the lyrics of this new, conscious hip hop.
The Heat, The Heat, The Heat (it's coming down hard)  We want to ensure that dissident, malcontent, bohemian, punk, and obsessively introverted artists are able to make a decent living. I've been playing around with my artist statement lately, for various projects. This is what I've written for my EAST application.
Working outdoors between a garden bed and a chicken coop, I use time, weather, and organic matter to create encaustic and oil abstract work. Intense weathering and repeated building/destruction of the surface captures time in passing, simultaneously degrading notions of a proper picture plane and gently mocking the cult of the image. These are not paintings, these are temporal objects. I like to say that I am a mixed⚒media post🛠modern artist but I primarily create encaustic abstracts outdoors 🏞 because I am an expressive hedonist who worships the 🌞 and is in love with the scent of melted 🐝wax and 🌳 sap.
Doesn't mean I'll stop. I'll keep turning that screw & hitting the surface hard.
+ and turn the screw +
New work. Busy work. I need to be working. I've got so many things going on in my life. Busy life. Working hard, family life, always learning. Creating. My abstract art takes so damn long to create! My abstract art is the slowest thing in my life. I love it.
These are called "Evolutions" because each new work is cut from a copy of the previous work. Since these are hand cut, slight variations occur each time. These variations, as well as more directed changes, will make the works change slowly over time.  The story: I've got a restless soul that can be traced back to my early childhood in Southern California. While all the other kids were busy playing games, I'd spend countless hours on swings or in the tops of trees watching the birds and daydreaming that I could fly away with them to wherever they were going. That sense of restless wonder never left and I've spent the last four decades moving to & fro between California, Texas, and Florida. My home in Austin, like many places I've lived, is very close to the airport. I enjoy watching the steady flow of airplanes coming and going, knowing that each plane is full of people, all with their own unique motivations and destinations. Now, with this body of work, that sense of restless wonder is captured with a flock of small paintings. I love watching these paintings fly away, leaving me to wonder where they’ve taken off to.
 When you stop by my place for this year's EAST, be prepared for a very active environment. Working outdoors, I create, destroy, and reconstruct temporal objects using encaustic, oil, heat, weather and time. (and time again) November 11-12 & November 18-19 11 am - 5 pm Stop #493 6311 Crumley Ln – (512) 696-9676 
Currently I am reintroducing representational images back into my work. These representations will be utilized as a means of furthering my argument that images do not exist.
I will render the images nonexistent, before your very eyes.  I bled the wax from this painting (and one of it's siblings, too). I actually didn't totally know what I was up to at the beginning of summer. I set this painting and it's sister up on the slightest of slight inclines in that circle of the yard the gets spot-on hot sun from 2PM - 5PM. And I let them drip drip drip all summer long.  The first month or two the pigmented wax bled and bled. I figured it would all run and then be gone. And then the end of July arrived and it was like 107° for a straight week hard. The wax that bled turned transparent, leaving behind only pigments.  I'm not totally sure what is next for these works. The bleeding of the wax and the long time spent outside have faded the luster. Perhaps it's time to lay down a fresh skin of wax to bleed next summer.
 I often struggle with defining my art for people. Defining abstract art is an arduous task in and of itself. My personal abstract art has it's origins in dada, punk, and existential philosophy, guided by a hard-fought life lived with force under the umbrella of a postmodern capitalist society. In a sense, my abstract art is my punk manner of expressing love for living in force while rejecting simple ideas, like commodity and definition.
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