STATEMENT
I paint those momentary interactions of light with tropical plants that create lightest lights and darkest darks --
luminosity filtering from above, shining from behind, crosshatching, reflecting, glowing.
My subject matter, like the shadow of a leaf upon a leaf, is a fragile reality -- always on the brink of transforming,
constantly in a state of becoming. Nevertheless it has all the power of light to make us feel, as well as see.
My paintings are executed on a scale that allows us to experience, rather than just view them,
by engaging our physiological reactions to color and light.
Though representational, my paintings refer to abstract beauty. For example, the progression of the fronds
in the structure of a palm echoes the progressions of sound in the music of J.S. Bach or the mathematics of the bell curve.
The physics of tropical plant leaves are the same as the physics of paint:
When light shines on a leaf, or a daub of paint, it actually causes it to rearrange its electrons,
in a process called transition. There the electrons are, floating quietly in clouds within their
atoms, and suddenly an array of light shines on them. If a portion of the light happens to
catch their natural vibration it shoots them to another energy level and that relevant bit of
light is used up and absorbed. The rest is reflected out, and our brains read it as color.
Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette, 2002, New York, Random House. Page 5