“Moistmedia” comes from Roy Ascott who used the term to describe an emerging substrate for 21st century art. I think he is correct. We are beyond the post-digital era where digital technology was a novelty in making art. Now digital technology is an integral part of the process and of our daily lives.

A symbiotic relationship is formed in the fusion of the dry silicon virtual medium with the wet biological medium of paint. For me combining the virtual and the natural worlds is similar to integrating the personal and global. This moist medium redefines the process with the knowledge that it imbeds itself in the narrative and anchors spaces that otherwise would be enveloped by images formed from either an apparent world or a distant external world. In this synthesis exists a new form of beauty.

On a more pragmatic level the drawing’s substrate are my digital photographs of printed on sustainable Hanhemühle bamboo or sugarcane paper using an Epson 4000 Professional inkjet printer with pigment based inks. This is the same equipment and ink The Boston Museum of Fine Arts uses for producing their reproductions of master works. I paint with egg tempera (a medium which uses natural pigments and egg yolk (Leonardo DaVinci’s painting The Last Supper is an egg tempera painting) exploring the surface and submerged areas and playing with the shapes and marks. The relationship between the two blur the virtual image and the painted image.

September 2008 Pacem in Maribus (Peace in the Oceans) Elizabeth Mann Borgese, and Rob Riemen’s book the Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal

The anemone drawings arose through inspiration from a passage in Susan Griffin’s novel  A Chorus of Stones: “Elements which had been divided came together, that which was floating in the ocean just below the surface not far from the light nor too near.”

When I owned a boat I’d often sit on the sun-drenched dock and watch the sea anemones moving tenderly in subdued sunlight. They seemed in harmony with all else and didn’t need a definition to be beautiful. No explanation was necessary for them to have meaning and, to me, they didn’t serve any purpose other than to stimulate wonder. They were simply part of this wave of conscious energy whose fate is inextricably linked directly to my own.

In the fall of 2008 on the anniversary of September 11 I revisited these anemones on a trip to Maine. At the same time I learned the first analysis of the genome of the sea anemone showed it to be nearly as complex as the human genome. Apparently this offered scientists major insights into the common ancestor of, not only humans and sea anemones, but of nearly all multi-celled animals. Pretty amazing how the more we see, the more we understand how closely we’re linked.

The anemone series is about that place of coalescence where the invisible becomes visible where the ideas of love and beauty become reality.

The stillness fusion drawings were inspired from the moment I stepped onto the tundra in Alaska. In that moment I experienced a stillness which resonated within me and I felt connected to something vast and unchanging. Today I find a harmony arises through the experience of both the stillness and the pulse of life.

These “fusion” drawings combine digital technology and traditional egg tempera painting, they combine movement and stillness. In this collaborative work the common ground and thread of connectivity is the earth. The base of the drawings are my digital images of a riverbed seen through the “lens” of water. It’s as if the river were painting and atop this I balance tempera stones.

The caryatid drawings began a series which coalesces the female figure with the environment as aesthetic forms emerging from a landscape as alive as we are. They are reverberations of a conversation about beauty. They are archetypes of the feminine energy and breakaway from traditional images of the caryatid as a female figure serving as a support or, as in Rodin’s sculptures, of bearing a too heavy weight. For me the feminine energy is not static nor caving under her load.

The feminine energy is an active, dynamic force that stimulates all movement and change in the universe, a kind of rhythmic dance of matter and energy. This feminine universal energy is what calls us to redefine ecology to include the human body, the earth body and the body politic and to retrieve our compassionate ethos. An ethos that remembers how we cherish each other and move into beauty. This archetype reminds us beauty is not a thing, it is a conversation.