Sensations come and go, fleeting glimpses difficult to describe – difficult to explain. Yet we fumble and try, often using one sensation to describe another in an attempt to clarify the vivid and ranging nature of moments in time and space. The sensation of color is no different. Navigating endless variations and combinations, color perceptions continually change, come into focus, and change again. Their interconnectivity gives life to the visual world. My paintings and how I go about making them, is an internal response to the sensation of rhythmic color and light as an entity unto itself.

The “distances” the paintings establish relate to the ways and degrees to which we engage space, from the physical and the visceral to the psychological and the conceptual. New sensations can be drawn out through the art of painting, aligned to nature but ethereal—existing in an atmosphere that supplants weight and distinction. Mining these perceptual possibilities is a direction I move in and am attached to.

My Ink Forms grow out of the same emphasis on sensation as my paintings. Layered, twisting lines of ink isolate specks of the paper to create an optically charged surface where depth and detail oscillate. A resonant but unspecific form is introduced and then reversed from portal to object, and back again. By releasing the ink and shape from the surface and context of the paper, presence and perception interchange.

Mike Stack 2013