My “String Theory,” series of paintings sinks its roots years back in my study of art history in college. I have always been fascinated with minimalism, and among my favorites historical examples are Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman. Both artists brilliantly illustrate the simple but undeniable power of spatial and color harmonies, and the almost magical ability of just a few lines to create mood and meaning.

The contrast between illusionistic imagery and flat decorative treatments has been at the conceptual core of my work for nearly twenty years, owing largely to my study of modern art, so it should come as no surprise that an image of birds essentially flying into a Barnett Newman painting came into my head like a thunderbolt. Visually these pieces have evolved far past the initial point of inspiration, but the initial concept is still discernable. The magic of the String Theory series is that simply by virtue of their proximity to more descriptive elements like the birds, otherwise completely flat areas of color become alive and animate in three-dimensional space. These pieces suggest the dislocation of birds from their natural environments and their adaptiveness to the urban and suburban habitats we have made. These colorful stripes are not meant to “describe” anything as mundane as a fence posts, branches, or bird feeders; rather they become their own non-objective environments, beautiful, evocative, and otherworldly.

Here, I have arranged a jumble of wrens, flitting about and ducking in and around a network of intersecting and overlapping lines. Initially, I was thinking about the dense thickets in which wrens routinely (and maddeningly to us birders) hide, though in execution the environment becomes far more decorative than descriptive.