I began to use gold, in the leaf form as well as in the powder form, very early on in my studies of Nihonga (literally "Japan-painting"). I was taught as a student that I must use the best materials in order to truly get to know the ancient craft. So, despite the cost involved, my MFA thesis painting used the best gold and minerals that I could purchase. I wrote in River Grace about the experience of encountering the extravagance of beauty leading to a profound wrestling of faith and art. The three major pieces that I've done in the last ten years in New York reveal the consistency (or stubbornness) of my insistence on continuing to use these materials, but with diverse results.

In painting the December Hour, I navigated between thoughts of life and death. Dedicating the piece to a dying friend, I prayed desperately as I layered gold over gold, struggling to understand God's wisdom in taking someone so young. In the medieval Book of Hours, December connotes death, but as I worked to complete it, and as I see it now, the painting speaks back to me as an emblem for the resurrection reality, that which theologian N.T. Wright has recently called "Life after Life after Death."

Golden Fire develops this theme further. Taking cues from Dante's Divine Comedy, this piece focuses on the theme of fire, particularly significant in our post 9-11 reality. I wanted to depict gold rising in the fire of destruction, and, at the same time, letting the surface also speak of the purifying power of fire.

My latest painting, Charis, further emphasizes the Golden Fire language. In homage to de Kooning, gold moves in a dispersed, gestured movement. Critic Clement Greenberg did not approve of De Kooning's paintings as pure abstraction since de Kooning did not deny the "essential flatness of a painted space." I am interested in the de Kooning that failed to fulfill Greenbergian definition of abstraction. My interest in abstraction is in the essentiation of reality, which, I believe, de Kooning was interested in as well. In that search, I became interested in creating space that is both flat and spatial at the same time. Gold is that paradox: it creates space (by being semi-transparent) and remains flat (by being mirror-like) at the same time. Perhaps the only way that an "essential flatness" can be full of created space is by using gold.

Takashi Murakami, in Super Flat, states: "The world of the future might be like what Japan is today - super flat." Murakami desires to merge the layers of high and low art, visually achieving flatness via Pop use of acrylic colors. His plastic images seem divorced from tradition, but his colors are a faithful remnant of his training in Nihonga tradition. While the flatness of imagery is an important legacy of Japanese tradition (and perhaps in a twisted way true to Greenberg), the superficiality and the virtuality of flat imagery can detach us from the greater Reality and the metaphysical. We may live in Flatland, but God does not.

Gold, in all civilizations, symbolizes divinity. The act of layering gold, to me, is to pray for the divine New Reality (multi-dimensionality) to break into our broken (flat) reality. Charis, the Greek word that St. Paul used for "grace," is shorthand for the word "charisma," which means gift. Art is a gift, and essentially, art is grace. A "grace arena" is created in the layered gold and minerals. The more I journey deeply into the effects of gold and mineral pigments, the more I am taken by the refractive possibilities of the materials, while at the same time unable to contain, and control, the glory built into them. Glory spills out, like the golden aura we stand under - a tabernacle of hope.