"Tradition is the veiling of fiery origins"
—Daniel Libeskin

RECENTLY I MET WITH my son Miles' kindergarten teacher in a parent/teacher conference. She told me that my home-based studio plays a significant role in my son's life at school; and that this was evidenced most recently by his interrupting their morning meeting. He reportedly blurted out, "My dad's an artist!" as if he were either asked a direct question, or there was some other context for this information. (In fact, they were discussing venomous reptiles.) "Well, that's interesting," his teacher replied, a bit unprepared for this tangent; "Can you describe his work?" she asked, hoping there might be some—albeit highly subjective—correlation between the topic at morning meeting and my artwork.

There wasn't; and Miles found himself face-to-face with the same challenges here before me: how does one discuss a subject that lacks the tangible and intriguing features — at least on a conversational level — of things like dangerous reptiles? Miles responded without pause: "My dad's art is about nothing...and something", he said. (Like all of my own "artist statements" before this one, he made no reference to reptiles.)

On that morning, Miles' class probably learned more about lizards than my art; but he raised a valid point. Pictorially speaking (which may be a contradictory premise), "something" and "nothing" translate to positive and negative space. Traditionally, artists create tension, meaning, and intrigue through the divide between the two. In Miles' own artwork, for example, the negative space is usually an ambiguous arena of fantasy, defined largely by the blankness of the paper, and the positive space is often Spider-Man or a Tyrannosaurus Rex. (I suspect either of these were the psychological trigger that — in his mind — connected reptiles to fine art during morning meeting.)

In my recent work, I've begun to form these spacial distinctions in a different way. I create environments by laying the work flat, and applying a field of wax shavings, sand, and metallic powders over the entire surface. I allow these materials to fall over the work indiscriminately. I later melt it all with a heat gun, and let the space take shape through the melting process. The result bares little resemblance to dinosaurs (and a bit less to Spider-Man), but even my son seems to recognize the relationships between "something" and the space that it occupies. As I rework the piece on the easel, and then lay it flat again, the "something" and "nothing" areas disappear and reappear, trading identities, until I like what I see.

Lately, the positive space has taken the form of distinct circles, as I use imagery from both a celestial and a cellular level. I try to move my psyche between the lens of a microscope, and that of a telescope. I borrow references from maps to allude further to the relative nature of scale, drawing parallels between the mapping of the solar system, and the mapping of DNA. The work is complete when I feel it invites the viewer to redefine—or at least recognize—the infinite exchanges between objects, and the worlds they inhabit; even if the result admittedly lacks the drama of the web-slinging wonder trying to harness a ferocious T-Rex.