Leslie Sacks Fine Art - Brentwood - OPENING RECEPTION - Shane Guffogg: Pastels - January 11- February 15, 2014

"Light has always been a central part of my art. In 2001, I began a series of paintings that had veils of light cascading down the surfaces. I was thinking of light lifted from a different source, like a reflection off of water that was then placed onto the picture plane. It was a way for me to make light an object.

These pastels are a fusion of thought and process, of a moment of making and becoming something that I can't imagine but can only realize when it fully manifests in front of me. Pastels have an immediacy to them that is so different from oil paint because they don't have to dry between painting sessions, which allows me to stay more deeply connected from the start to finish.

Mark making - a moment where the subconscious and conscious are bridged via the mark on a sheet of paper. That initial movement of the hand, the drawing of a line that curves and moves in on itself, then moves away into a new space; that for me is a pure moment. The medium of pastel has an innate purity that lends itself wholly to that moment.

The particles of pastel that cascade down the surface dance over and across the picture plane, like particles of falling colored light creating imaginary spatial planes that push the first moment of my process and each succeeding moment back into a conceptual space. What if these light particles are falling in front of us all the time and we just can't see them? What if there was a thin sheet between our 3rd dimension and a 4th dimension that only becomes visible when we let go of our preconceived ideas of reality? These are all questions that bring up a moment, an idea, and a realization that we are more than the sum of our parts."