Artist’s Statement

My digital artwork extends and restructures compositional elements, images, and allusions from my drapery paintings that in turn invoke and reinvent Renaissance canonical painting.  The geometric understructure in Renaissance paintings is the precursor of algorithmic construction in digital images. Drapery images in Renaissance paintings are the fluid compositional elements that shift through the geometric understructure. The folds of a garment can be pushed, pulled, and gathered to fit into a composition so that the viewer’s eye will move from one section of the painting to another. In some sense, drapery is the one recognizable piece of subject matter that remains completely abstract. It is in a state of transformation or becoming. In Renaissance painting cloth can mysteriously move and float through the fabric of space and time.

I seek to give my digital compositions a feel of fluctuating space, like the space of a moving piece of cloth—something in a mutable state. Digital technology makes it easy for me to create multiple if not endless reiterations of images and mirror images. Using elements/images from my paintings that allude to Renaissance paintings I construct multiple iterations of these elements and a composition that displays self-similarity and fractal dimensionality. The composition itself moves to become drapery that veils and unfolds interpenetrating space. The fluctuating and enfolding space that cloth inhabits parallels a model of sub-atomic physics, string theory or super-string theory. The idea of fractal geometry and the constant vibration of infinitely many strings has a similarity to French post-structuralist theory in general and Deleuze’s ideas of The Fold in particular “…a virtuality that never stops dividing itself.” Deleuze’s model or “monads” is a series of Becomings where difference creates a universal harmony. So pictorial space, like drapery space, string theory, and post-structuralism all create an infinite folding of becoming, the movement and variation of image and idea. My experiments in digital media revise images from my drapery paintings into landscapes that play with the idea of mise en abyme, “placing into infinity” or “placing into the abyss,” to formally create a fractalized space of endless reflexivity.