Exploring these questions, I have reassigned the non-representational qualities of abstraction to give specific meaning, and I use biographical data paired with chance to inform images of specific subjects that are categorized as various “Water Types” such as rain and ocean with attributes taken from the I Ching.

In this group of portraits, the images’ dimension is the subject’s height.

​LINES. The horizontal graphite lines equal the number of years in the subject’s life. Like the rings of a tree where a year with plentiful rain produced wider rings and drought the opposite, the distance between the lines corresponds to whether it was a good year (expansive-wide) or a bad year (reductive-narrow) for the subject.
The graphite lines from the paintings extend onto the walls and may connect with adjacent portraits.

ARTISTIC PROCESS and CATEGORIES OF WATER. The action/gesture of the initial paint application corresponds to the feeling of force/energy from a person’s biography. After the paint is thrown, the “Water Type” is determined by the appearance of the result.

​COLOR and SYMBOLISM. Color choices reflect biographical information, symbolic or real.

Finally, the editing process uses black or white paint, tones which I consider neutral.

​After more than 20 years of experimentation, scouring performance, video, photography, installation and digital media for ways to make representation more neutral, I found my holy grail in a return to abstraction, locating a groundbreaking way to represent people using a biographical framework as a point of departure.