Since the start of this journey when I decided to leave painting and venture into the world of three dimensions, I hoped to someday return home to painting with a new understanding. I now know how to address oil painting in a dimensional way. With my study of Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, Frank Stella, Robert Ryman, and Elizabeth Murray, I definitely have solid precedence of this idea. The understanding that although there are obvious differences in painting and sculpture, there is also a hybrid concept where an amazing communication between the two can happen. This is the revelation that painting and sculpture both have the same endeavor in their commenting on the phenomenon of “space”.

The image and object always have negative space in common, which in a way can be called “oxygen” in that all art needs to breath. The figure/ground relationship is this series’ focus. I found that in terms of painting, one procedure was to connect imagery to a developed support that acts more like a spontaneous “territory’ rather than a preconceived shape. In this way, the support may change in response to the “need” of the imagery, and vice versa, with the imagery and support in true communication, both being flexible until a balance is achieved. Or the work can take a literal form where the sculptural figure dwells in front of a charcoal drawing on canvas and metaphorically, be a comment on humankind and our existence in this world.