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Materials: wood, screws and grommets, Styrofoam, paint, museum putty, and submersible LED lights lit by 48-hour batteries

Surrounded by forest, the sculptures floated in the pond’s clear space, moving in concert with the wind. Nature subsumed these sculptures; once afloat, they belong more to the natural world than the man-made.

The floating sculptures appear in photographs as smaller, distant objects. Yet the experience in person was quite different: Walking the trail around the pond led one quite close to the light sculptures, and the energy of the lights made size irrelevant.

I constructed and installed these seven ephemeral Floating Light Sculptures during a May 2013 residency at I-Park Foundation in rural Connecticut. The residency allowed me to develop an idea dating to 1994, and bring it to fruition.

The sculptures were octagons and circles, and they ranged in diameter from 9 inches to 5 ½ feet. They were best seen at night when their white glow was intense. I was surprised that the forms maintained a quiet presence during the day. Equally unexpected was how the LED lights mimicked the moon’s glow and color.

Many thanks to Lani Asuncion for the nighttime photos: #’s 6 – 10.

Body Drawings

Any body of work is the culmination of various parts of life. When completed, they have their own life, apart from the stories that one might remember about their genesis.

These Body Drawings came from conscious and subconscious places. They first appeared in my painting journals, although I had played with blurring writing out in a painted scroll work in 1993. They jumped out of the journals when I was the freelance visual arts critic for the Austin-American Statesman. The writing took more time than the studio, and these works were an assertion of the primacy of the visual in the studio and in my life. I wrote out stories on ond around the body, but blurred the words so they became visual images, a kind of energy.

When my internist first took my medical history, he asked what I did. At that time, I worked for the Statesman and in my studio. I answered I was an artist and a writer. He said, “Oh, you use both sides of your brain.” This body of work gives that observation form, but skews the story through visual communication.