Amber Series

These paintings are half-science and half-aesthetics: partly a celebration of life’s beauty and partly an immersion into the details of death. Flies, bees, and bits of plant matter hang, frozen in this luminous yellow world. Their positions look effortless; they look like they might be buzzing around in midair, rather than petrified in tree sap for the last million years. The artist renders the graceful wings and delicate legs with excruciating attention to the play of light through the not quite translucent amber…he is a master at making discrete daubs and lines of color resolve at a short distance into living, breathing, photographic clarity - a virtuoso display of volumetric bodies floating in three dimensional liquid space.

   Lindsey Westbrook, East Bay Express, 2000