My work has been influenced by photographs of things we cannot see with the naked eye in real time, Ultra-Deep Field astronomical photographs, poorly erased whiteboards, sidewalks, ruins, abandoned industrial sites, ancient stone surfaces, fire, sand, sea, ice, foundries, concrete, pubic hair, cytoplasm, craters, wood grain, railroad car markings, Skandinavian Kultur, runes, scratched surfaces, the human voice, the night sky, the inside of an eyeball, the surface of other planets, scars, deserts, scorched earth, and the accidental, which is not really indeterminate, but the result of subtler action on a deeper plane of consciousness.
I have been particularly inspired by improvisational music: Vijay Ayer, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Theolonus Monk, Dewey Redman, Flamenco, Jamaican Freestyle, Imrat Khan and the improvisational traditions of the Indian subcontinent.
Growing up in Seattle my visual starting point for painting was Mark Tobey’s White Writing paintings, and Pacific Northwest Scandinavian textile, architectural, and design traditions, which tend to be highly abstract. Later, it was Klee and Miro: In terms of color theory there is a direct lineage from Itten and Klee to Albers to Dahn to myself. At university, influences also came from Michael Spafford and the Black Mountain school via Jacob Lawrence and Robert C. Jones, then slightly later, Cy Twombly via his New York City exhibitions in the 1970s.
My work has followed a life-long interest interrogating how human consciousness processes visual stimuli especially when involving two-dimensional information on a surface. With the ever-increasing involvement of humans with flat screens, a deeper understanding of how two-dimensional cognitive processing operates has become more central to understanding human experience than ever before.