Illumination Gallery is a product of my fascination with William Blake, whose magical books combined text and imagery in what can only be described as a metaphysical fashion. As a writer I always idolized Blake, yet lacking the skills to paint or draw I could never do what he did in print media. So - as a writer/director - I explored mediums like film, video, and theater, since they offered the possibility of stretching myself visually. Yet none of these mediums were right for me because they did not allow for that perfect balance Blake struck in his work between word and image. Then along came personal computers and their graphical capabilities, and along came the web. It took a number of years and it wasn't easy, but ultimately I learned how to set myself along a Blakean path. The end result - a linguistically based harnessing of web animation - proved both a testament to William Blake and an artistic departure from his influence over me, which is something Blake would most certainly have approved of, for if he was about anything artistically it was originality.
Through animated texts, a new poetic form I invented, Illumination Gallery evokes that thin line separating visual from verbal information, dynamically illustrating how human beings react to visual patterns and colors on a purely visceral level while at the same time relying on language to make sense of visual stimuli. In no way are the pieces on this website meant to resemble traditional cinematic/video animations, which are based around the illusion of motion - with still frames flipping by at rapid speed in a seemingly seamless montage. Here there is nothing rapid speed or seemingly seamless. Yes, we have nuance, but nuance and seemingly seamless are two different things. My animated texts slow down visual flow, so the eye can zone in on a parallel dimension floating at the cusp of imagery and text.