During the summer of 2005, I began to investigate large-scale paintings that involved the pictorial means of process (art), flat space, and mark/surface manipulation of images of lillies.

I had been painting images of the plants grown in my garden for a number of years. I was intrigued with the notion of mixing stain painting (normally produced on un-primed canvas) with a more opaque paint application over standard gesso. This process hinted at my academic exposure to Late Modernism, a period of time that was thriving during my early days in art school.

The pour or drip of paint, so eloquently done by Louis or Pollock, was sensed as I made a simple drip-mark. The line of the tape used to make minimal shapes echoed the disciplined mathematics of Held or Reinhardt. The decorative tendencies of Zakanitch or Schapiro gave me permission to lather and embellish thick paint.

As I worked, I pondered over the pluralistic tendencies of the 1970's to-date; painting (due to its so-called "death" in the late sixties), had splintered into a myriad of genres, and splintered again and again. Eclectic--intellectually and visually--painting had been freed from strict historical demarcations of Modernism. Yet, as I layered the paintings in odd juxtapositions of technique and style, I felt as if they belonged together in a large intertextual discourse, each language balancing another.

The stained and minimalist portions of the work are acrylic, the painterly areas of flowers are oil. Technically, they are a mix of approaches to painting: watercolor stain, opaque acrylics, and painterly oils mixed with alkyd resins. Alternative painting supplies are not used, as I want the work to be archival.

Sundials, invented by the Egyptians over three thousand years ago, use the elemental rays of the sun to connect humans to a specific time in a specific place. When viewed in an older country garden, the sundial affords the visitor a glimpse into the past: a place where technology has not yet substituted itself for nature. Time seems to move more slowly, and garden visitors can relax and meditate upon the beauty of the garden.

Yet the moon-the sun's counterpart—moves slowly, following its own spectral rhythm, and transforms the garden into a quieter, more introspective place. The moondial, hardly known outside England, can tell time just as surely as the sun, but only as it chooses. The ghostly light, like the white flowers of the night garden, treat time lightly.

The city of Redding, California anticipates Santiago Calatrava's Pedestrian Bridge, which contains a sundial within its architecture. While the bridge will make visitors more aware of the nature habitat of the Turtle Bay area, Jean Gallagher's multi-media installation,

Moondial, symbolically connects a moondial to the artist's personal garden. The installation is minimal in its architecture, so that the viewer may feel the comfort of the quiet space. The back walls of the gallery exhibit several dozen backlit photographic images of flowers from Gallagher's garden; some bloom at night, others only appear to.

Within the center of the garden room, the visitor is asked to relax on a "moon couch," to watch dissolving light projections of the waxing and the waning of the moon. A blue light softly silhouettes an oversized moon dial.
Funded by the Redding Museum of Art. 1999.