My work focuses on the interplay between color, culture, history, music, and contemplating the future.
My process is centered around an appreciation for the materials that I’m using— their history, their color, and what they can offer to the space— a bit of sampling in some ways. I tend to work mainly with natural/unbleached surfaces and I enjoy preparing them (and building them up) with transparency in mind. This allows the materials I’m using to offer their own insights, riffs, and solos to each creative jam session. A glitch in the canvas weave or quirky wood grain can be an accent point (like a triplet or some off-kilter tuplet jive when people were expecting boring quarter notes), and there is magic in that.
Jazz exists at the center of my Venn diagram— along with Hip-hop, and electronic genres such as Drum and Bass and House music. Records from those more recent genres sample elements from Jazz, paying homage to, and reflecting on the history of the sound. Even when relying on the newest technological trends, it’s not at all strange to find elements of musical production and engineering developed with an analog “warmth” in mind. Sounds recorded with the most pristine quality are mangled and manipulated to fit and fill space.
As a polymath I began to see that filling the space, and trying to find the relationships between elements within it is also vital to my visual work. Design, painting, and sculpture all rely on spatial relationships and interactions. A drummer, horn player, keyboardist and bass player will have to find their way around a tune, or solo, or vocalist to keep the groove going.
You see, it’s all the same in my head. The old, the new, the yet to be— It’s funky, and syncopated, and it’s all interconnected. All powered by ©Leroyficial Intelligence™.
This explanation of my process will likely evolve a bit more, and I’ll get better at explaining it (probably)1.
1Probably not. Who am I kidding? I just put a bunch of words together like colors and Poof ya got some paragraphs up there. Look at that! Word Art! Anyway, I’m still technically an art student with much to learn, so stay tuned…