About the Work

“My theory, in brief, is that works of art are embodied meanings.” Arthur C. Danto

The works presented on this website have little or nothing to do with expanding the boundaries of art.  Instead, the art endeavors to take a well established language, that of minimalism and to use that language to explore the seen and unseen nature of things. Elementalism is a variation of minimalism. In this context minimalism is essentially a reductive process removing complexity so that only the fundamental idea remain. Elementalism by contrast is moving the opposite direction. Elementalism infers an additive process. Rather than reducing down to the fundimental, elementalism eminates from the fundimental and progresses toward complexity. This concept underlies all the works. It may be more or less apparent in an individual work but is conceptually present in all. It is the foundation for the exploration of various themes such as order and disorder (chaos), energy and matter, form and space.

One of the aims of the work is to be approachable. Through the use of archetypal forms of elementalism the work strives to induce a subconscious recognition of meanings. This allows the work to come from a place of knowing and then move into areas of more complex ideas. In this way it is hoped that the work will have a universality. The use of basic shapes, forms, and lines allows for an interplay to take place. The image is built upon and also constrained by the underlying elemental forms.

Although this work is likely seen as abstract, in some ways it is actually representational. Not in the sense that representational art strives to accurately depict the physical world around us. Rather that it represents things in reality that are not ordinarily seen in our day to day perception of physical reality. Science has opened up the world of the unseen but no less real. The world beyond our senses. The reality beneath reality. This can seem rather clinical and yet the hope is that the work will serve to bridge the gap between the mechanics of the natural world and the miracle of life. We are more than a collection of bits and bytes, we are the universe looking back on itself.

“If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.” Hindu Prince Gautama Siddhartha: The Founder of Buddhism