“GLASS CEILING (Detail)”, oil on canvas, 66” x 76”, 2026
“Glass Ceiling” deals with layers of dissected and faceted spaces, beginning as a study of the Crystal Palace in London which in the mid 19th century was the first ever glass ceiling in the history of civilization. Consider the human aspiration for transparent ceilings going back to early prehistory when some early human lifted a thin sheet of ice off a lake and barked to his companion how nice it would be if their cave had see through ceilings. Consider the lead limned glass panels as a thin umbrella dome above you. Then also consider an American traveling in European cities for the first time seeing the entire city broken into facets cut and delineated by tram lines. The streets, buildings, people and sky cut into the random sections of positive space within the boundaries of the tram line wires and cables. Consider how your eye only registers objects and spaces from your wandering glance and how your mind repeatedly creates and updates mental constructs of your surroundings as you move through time and space. This endless visual reverberation in gray.
“Daugavpils, Latvia #3”, acrylic on paper, 1.5m x 2m, 2025
“Daugavpils, Latvia #3”, acrylic on 200 gram paper, 1.5m x 2m, 2025
This painting is from a series I made while in Residency at the Mark Rothko Museum in Daugavpils, Latvia. Daugavpils is Latvia’s second largest city after Riga and located near the Russian border. I spent a few weeks there in September, 2025 exploring the city and painting about it’s architecture. It has a mixture of unrenovated 19th century buildings and plenty of Soviet Bloc tenements, with a small city center adjacent to a large ancient fortress on the Daugava River. The paintings deal with the shapes and forms of the city as seen peripherally, where positive and negative space forms compete with the repeating forms in architecture, combining to form a better sense of how it feels to be in this city.
