HAZE:

It began when I drove over Signal Hill and could clearly see the Hollywood sign. I had been living in Long Beach for roughly ten years, how had I never noticed it before?

The next day it was gone, along with the entire city of Los Angeles, lost in an obfuscating haze.

Through that experience I began to view the landscape differently. I became increasingly aware of the ever-shifting haze that blankets the city. I was fascinated by this cloud that settled on the horizon: one day nearly opaque and the next offering visibility for miles; one day a blue misty fog and the next a distinctly gray-brown cloud of smog and grit. This new awareness prompted an effort to document and represent this visual experience through color and image, but literally photographing the air proved to be problematic.

The paint samples supply a consistent external reference to describe a specific color experience. The highly romanticized sample names call attention to our idealized emotional associations with color and beauty and at times add their own humorous or ironic commentary. The daily rituals highlight the broad range of possible conditions and gather information on some of the factors that contribute to these varied results. Thus what began as an occasional exercise has developed into a daily practice of color matching, photographing, and data collection.