Artist's Statement of Intent

I was raised to be proud of my Italian heritage. When as a child I began showing promise and passion for being an artist, my father would show me images of paintings and sculptures by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, telling me that they were my ancestors - among the greatest artists in history. I've often felt that by maintaining a foothold in the traditional media of paint and canvas I'm carrying on the lineage of these legendary Italians.

A zeal for invention and technology is another connection I draw from these artistic immortals. My loyalty to painting is coupled with my delight for digital imaging, and one medium informs the other. My computer tools have become essential to my method of sketching a design, choosing colors and executing each piece. The ease with which I can create mathematically precise geometric shapes, mirror reflections and symmetrical iterations has deeply influenced my artistic voice. What's most essential to me is that I'm able to express my visions successfully - I use whatever tools the visions require.

Growing up in Canada, I was surrounded by the visually rich and powerful images of Northern Indigenous artists, full of stylized forms that vibrate with straightforward spirituality. These artists pay homage to the deep connection they feel with nature in their depictions of magical deities and mythological spirit animals, pulsating with colorful life-force energy. Eventually I found myself being drawn to the art of other indigenous cultures such as the ancient people of Australia and South America. The commonalities that inspire me are the expressions of awe at the beauty of the intangible; the act of creating art as a work of devotion; the ability of the artist to bring the unseen into visible form; and most unambiguously, the visceral potency of color.

You may get a sense of my own deeply-felt connection with nature as you look at each of my pieces, though perhaps not at the level of humans, animals and plants, but at the level of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles. Profound metaphors and dynamic images are triggered within me when I read the writings of cosmologists and theoretical physicists. The idea that we are nothing more or less than a dance of energetic potentialities is, to me, a palpable truth.

This existential dance, like dancing to music, is at its heart, a tapestry of patterns and order. Our brains are pattern-recognition machines, as Michael Shermer calls them, organs that have evolved to look for and interpret patterns in our perceptions. It's how we learn and how we create meaning. This is the essential dialogue between what we believe ourselves to be and what we believe to be outside of ourselves.

Repetition and rhythm are tools for inducing trance. Think of chanting, or the shaman's drum - the idea is to relax the mind's continual grasping for novelty with predictability and monotony. A state of feeling liberated from the body becomes accessible: the ecstatic state (ecstasy: from ecstasis or ex-stasis - being transported out of standing still) is the releasing of the unconscious mind and facilitating intensified emotions and freeform creative thought. Though the word "hypnosis" comes from the name of the Greek god of sleep, a hypnotic trance is thought to be a state of hyperawakeness, where more profound understandings can be realized.

Vibrata Chromodoris