I grew up in the High Rocky Mountains of western Colorado, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that I enjoy solo activities of self-expansion like backcountry snowboarding, painting, and meditation. I enjoy it most when I can find ways to make these activities overlap. For the last few years, I have been using Solar Fast sun prints to create two separate bodies of work which attempt to merge my painting and meditation practices. One series depicts various concepts and symbols from a variety of disciplines including zazen, tantra, the i-ching amongst others.
The second body of work is a series of compositions determined entirely by the results of a single-player dice game I made up. Everything from the number of compositional elements, to the colors used, to the objects placed within the photogram, is determined by the dice. For me, this is an exercise in removing the ego of painting - by leaving the decision making up to chance, the painter can focus on enjoying the labor of painting, applying the medium to the surface. It has been fun seeing this series evolve almost like a language of glyphs, endless permutations within a finite system.