Art and life should not be divorced. Art objects are objects in the real world. Yet, I cannot agree with recent artists, like Frank Stella, who believe that in a painting, "Only what can be seen there is there."1 A painting can have transcendent content, but not in the sense of something "other." The content must be "in", and "between", and in relation to the viewer. Therefore, in my own painting, I attempt a synthesis between the empirical and the transcendent. In this synthesis, I meld the subjective and objective. Building on the Slavic mysticism of Malevich and the French rationalism of Duchamp, I mitigate strict geometry with atmospheric automatism. I accept the art object as object but transcend that objecthood. First, the objecthood is emphasized by maintaining the surface skin of the board, riding the surface, articulating its literalness. Then an ambience is created with bivalent indeterminate grounds. This ambience is created specifically by switching transitivity of ground and shape. Ground becomes shape and moves to the front, yet retains a possible reading of ground. In some of my work, this reading goes both ways and forms a continuum. In a few works, the change is in one direction,primarily. Close value, chromatic equality, or perceptual ambiguity related to geometry effect these changes. Whatever the method, the result is energy change, and the inert physical object is transcended
