Medium Studies
2026
Oil on digital Canvas
Explorations on bridging expressive strength of both oil painting and procedural digital algorithms
Explorations on bridging expressive strength of both oil painting and procedural digital algorithms
Art making, for me, is a way of encoding meaning into matter. The artist draws from two sources at once, the visible world and their own inner life, and binds them together. When the binding is true, the material stops being only material. It begins to carry a meaning from within, and the work becomes transcendent.
Every medium carries its own expressive resonance. Oil holds light and time differently than code does, and each lets the artist say something the other cannot. The medium is never neutral. It is the binder through which meaning is encoded, and it shapes the meaning it carries.
This series studies how mediums can be combined, and what new meaning that combination can encode.
Each piece begins as oil on canvas: loaded brushstrokes made by hand, the weight and hesitation of the gesture still in them. Those strokes are then reconstructed as a volumetric field of Gaussian splats, a digital canvas that holds real paint not as a flat surface but as a space you can move around and through. The stroke keeps its body. What changes is that it now lives inside the procedural, navigable logic of code.
Oil is slow, physical, irreversible, and records the hand. The algorithm is weightless, endlessly re-viewable, and records structure. Bound together on one surface, they encode a resonance that amplifies the experience beyond the reach of either material, the way two tones sounded together give rise to a third. This is where I look for the transcendent: not somewhere beyond the materials, but in what happens when they are bound into one another.
This series grows directly out of Hybrids, where a machine drew the scaffold and the hand completed the face. Here the collaboration moves inside the paint itself. It returns to a question that has run through the work since Skylines: what art making becomes when a mark passes between a machine and a body. And it shares the preoccupations of Memory and Time Studies, where the digital is not a clean replacement for matter but a place where matter can be held and re-encountered.
If art making is the binding of inner meaning into matter, these studies ask what a single stroke of oil becomes when it is bound twice: once by the oil, and once by the code.
