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Emphasizing color intensity and existential expression, my work has as its goal a certain kind of rapture. The Gray Series is a cyclical body of work of sustained investigation of the admixtures of black and white and color in painting. This particular series, The Black Room, produced in 2012, is organized in a one-inch grid, split diagonally into 120 bands, that are painted sequentially in a tonal range of four to eight or more black and white admixtures that collectively appear as luminous gray tones in an all-over, non-compositional field. Aesthetic content is derived intuitively from what could be perceived as the polar opposites of chromatic relationships set in repetitive engagement with the play of light as it unfolds out of darkness. Twelve pure, highly saturated hues symbolize the spectrum. Their size and ambiguous figure-ground arrangement may lead to a new and unexpected sense of scale. Uniform precision of the painting facture frees the viewer to concentrate on color effects. But autonomy of color - and its interaction as content - is not exclusive of the personal. In my work, I think of color as manifest in the phenomenological, and I am interested in the fleeting shifts of light. Sensations are experienced in a slow way of viewing, akin to meditation: As the gray diagonals merge into an unspecified position or infinite field, the pure, spectral colors take turns to enter the viewer’s space in rising intensity, striving perhaps not to particular ends, but -- by contrasting the undefined -- to make visible a profounder reality, rarely achieved in everyday experiences. Inspiration for The Black Room is an actual bedroom from a Roman villa of the first century B.C., which can be observed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Its walls are of a very deep gray, sparsely decorated with elongated colored lines that symbolize architectural features. These murals have a highly polished finish, presumably to glitter magically in the candlelight.