This is my first draft. I will be editing and invite any corrections in grammar, comments on lack of clarity and any need for elaboration. Just remember I don’t want to expand it too much. It has to be concise.
Artist’s Statement:
I want people to see two things: The world as it is, and the world as it could be. As an artist this involves the creation of images that stop the viewer for a moment, just enough to awaken the thought that an image, idea or concept that was once obvious and could be taken for granted is no longer so simple. I want my images to show that what appears to be simple may be rather complex, and likewise that some complexities around us are more simple than they seem. Take for example my work documenting vacuum formed plastic; a mundane material that has changed the way we live, yet we discard without little thought to its simple elegance and aesthetic form. In a world drenched in images, we do the same with the human form. We classify people according to some perverse aesthetic logic, that elevates some of us to objects of worship and others to the trash heap of the marginalized.
For the most part I am enamoured with the human figure in art along with the history of portraiture. Whether depicted in drawing from a live model, painting in acrylic, oil or encaustic, or in photography and printmaking, we as human beings are unfinished works made and being made into something more than what we appear to be on the surface of things. We see the details of our humanity from moment to moment, however, we are simply far more than we can imagine we are.
They say the devil is in the details, and I say ‘yes,’ if we are lost there. However, as an artist, whether as complex and detailed a figurative work as say Roger van der Weyden, or as beguilingly simple as Julian Opie, its the near obsessive attention to the details; the obliquely sensual love for line, mark making, brushstroke, scratching and scribbling, ephemeral movement, layering, glazing, timed dodging, you name it, its the minutiae and care, the supremely loving care for the details that comes together into that allusive moment when we say, this is it. Its finished; at least as an image to be presented. Because that is where it enters into the bigger vision. It becomes part of the world, not just the art world. In some way each work is another spanner in the wheel; a stick of dynamite in the tank track.
The litmus test, in my mind, is when the experience of observing and contemplating “Art” is not simply a pleasant afternoon visit to a local gallery. “Art” should on some level be an encounter with the divine; it should lead to violent introspection, tears of sadness, cries of joy; “Art” should mess with your soul and spirit, creating a discomfort with things as they are; it should do no less than make you see the world anew.
