My beginnings were humble if not insignificant. My father was an educated farmer of Swiss heritage, John Richard Hiigli. My mother, Phyllis May Ingleman was the daughter of a coal miner. Her ancestors were English and German. My younger brothers and sister and I grew up on a small family dairy farm a few miles from the southern tip of Lake Michigan outside the village of Union Mills, Indiana.

The early foundations of my thought developed as I lay in my bed searching the night skies through the screen window, as I wandered through the prairie woods to the creek through early morning fog, as I lay back in the grass in the afternoon sun gazing at the clouds rolling by. The oak, the willow, the pine and the maple were my companions; the sun, the wind and the rain were my teachers. I puzzled over the intriguing aspect of nature. Who are we? Who am I? And what if I were naught? I could not imagine a world dark and empty and un-peopled. And therefore I must be here for some reason, there must be a purpose for my existence. I listened to the wind in all her many aspects and to the restless and never ending running water in the creek. I observed again and again the many moods and faces of the beautiful and fascinating world of nature all around me. And I knew somehow, instinctively that I must use my talents, whatever I possess, to create something that would remain, something beautiful, something that I could give of myself, in return for this beautiful gift of life. I knew that I would never forget these days under the open skies; and that I would never, never, be the same!

Later, in my twenties, having bolted the New York Studio School and the hard, naked urban landscape to find nature again I came quite inadvertently upon a multi-faceted, wire frame geodesic nestled in a park in the heartland. Later I began building these strange, minimalist structures using multi-colored acetate. Then there were encounters with buildings wrapped in sheets of translucent colored plastic wrap at La Defence in Paris. Abhorring the sensory overload, the jumbled space and the frenetic pace, yet in need of access to material and the abundance of ideas, with no Saint Victory Mountain visible through grimy, smeared, waxy windows, and feeding off the cities energy, I turned with inevitable necessity to a “pragmatic contingency”, to mathematics and art, and to the gossamer layering of transparent sheets of color, seeking to shatter the opaque picture plane and break through to the other side, to a suggestion at least of what infinity in glorious color feels like.

I turned to the creation of certain images of totality, images that are optical and energetic, that are not a “signal” or transmitter, or point of reception of “something else”, but are objects, things, states of mind, visions, expressions that stand for what they are in and of their own unique selves.

Throughout the history of art, geometry has been equated with the perfection of natural order and light has been perceived as the vehicle for spiritual transport. My work continues in this tradition, using polyhedra as a metaphor for nature (as “spatial panorama”), and color as a mode of transcendence.

By transport I mean movement of the eye through the picture plane, through the tetranet; by transcendence I mean going beyond the limitations of opaque oil paint. The transparent pigments that I began to experiment with provides for the viewer a “window of transport” through space, into the nucleus, and thus into infinity.

The process I use involves both simple structures and complex constructions. In the complex constructions increasing numbers of polyhedra having a common nucleus are embedded in a vector matrix. Within the largest structure is embedded a smaller structure, which encloses an even smaller third structure, which itself encloses a tiny fourth structure, etc. This decreasing volumetric relationship between the structures produces the illusion of deep space, and a sense of time as well.

Such structures each have a front and a rear layer of facets. Thus there are potentially several separate layers of paint. In order to avoid color distortion I developed a strategy of “color deferral” applied to the rear layers of facets, and “omission” of selective facets of frontal layers.

In the first case paint is applied to the rear facets of the structure until it makes contact with the rear facets of the structure that it encloses, at which point it “ceases” and “defers” to the local colors of the next layer, and so on.

In the case of frontal faces of layers a “process of selective omission” is applied. Frontal facets are omitted which obstruct the view of the nucleus. Thus there is a clear unobstructed view of the core structure, at the very heart of the vector matrix. The omitted facets are painted sheer gossamer white for clarity, to unify the picture plane, and to maximize transparency.

Obviously “transparency” is the key to the visual effect. The process of layering transparent paint plays with the formal constraints of painting. Geometric forms are perceived as flat, like the picture plane and are also perceived as volumetric, allowing the eye to enter to the focal center or nucleus of the complex polyhedral construction. Passage or the linkage of planes, which occurs with the layering, allows the viewer to perceive geometries as both self-contained and constantly shifting. The comprehension of the form is linear and concrete, yet translucent and tenuous. These oppositions reveal the structure as process, and process, in turn, is inseparable from time. Time makes the concept of physical and spiritual transport complete!

Pragmatism suggests the determination of truth or meaning of concepts by testing of practical results and contingency suggests a certain dependence on chance. The "color" of any particular point on the picture plane is determined not by its "local" or applied color, as in any "opaque" oil painting, but rather by its interaction with all previous and all future "screens" of color, therefore according to its "position" within the "hierarchy of screens."

Painters walk in the footpaths of giants, creating reality out of myths spun around work, striving for meaning by relating it to history. Transparent painting is not without historical precedent. It refers back to Cezanne’s watercolors, where he used thinly applied screens (ecrans) of colors over colors. Before Cezanne the Venetian Renaissance Masters experimented with such techniques as under painting and glazing. Still earlier Orthodox Icon Painters made art in which light technically came from the background, from the gesso. As in my paintings, there was no source of light, which would illumine objects from one side, or from another. In the Transfiguration three disciples (high on a mountain) saw the face of Christ shine as the sun. His clothes were white as the light. This divine light, that led me from my home, on this long journey, that inspires me to paint, is the very breath of my existence.