CANDELA series (2012-2014)

This series of paintings began with a modest group of small polished stones, a few pieces of coloured paper, aluminum foil, a sheet of black polyethylene, and a small but intense light source. As I arranged and rearranged groupings of the stones the lighting became increasingly central to the quality of the emerging still lifes. The components—stones, paper, foil, black plastic—rapidly came to be little more than volumes and surfaces whose function was only to catch, reflect, redirect and reveal the real subject of the paintings: light! Candela, a measure of the brightness of a source of light, its luminous intensity, seemed a useful title for the series and each painting’s title uses a pair of colours—silver-fuchsia, bronze-cobalt, turquoise-magenta, etc.—to reinforce the idea that the stones and other materials have no value or function other than to participate in the generation of pictorial events in which colour and light are the primary players.