An evaluation of my creativity seems to reveal glaring discordance. Historical consideration and response to theoretical insight and philosophy never tends to be the foundation of my work, but instead services as a kind of buttressing. Regularly, it does not in fact buttress the work itself but a linguistic examination of the work. The inspiration or seed of my work is shifting, and rather than preserve or expand of the details I tend to attempt a freeze frame of moments. In the process of creating, artwork takes its own course and naturally extends itself as a representation of multiple emotions and temporal perceptions. This is the appeal of working visually after all; it gives access to more than a literal reflection and implies a way of looking that is often outwardly foreign, even to the artist responsible.
My work is being constantly perforated by the inquiry ongoing in modernity and post-modernity. Attacks on representation and mimesis often act as flint for new ideas and twists of process, but they tend to be punctuation marks more than reformations. My work is integrally oriented around the phenomenon of change. Intellectual discourse is doomed to follow and never lead the personal trailblazing of my mutating art practice. I would not have it any other way. The alchemy at work in painting is not tied to physical results or ratified formulas, and when one tries this the alchemy is gone and metaphor takes its place. Metaphor and obvious symbolism are the curse of a linguistic mindset, and to (psycho) analyze artwork via these devices is to loose hold of the value intrinsic to painting. At most significations and direct references emerge in small parts of the canvases I work with, as part of the composition but not as the composing logic. Presenting is just as important as representing in the attempt to synthesize a new object, and so construction and invention are a huge part of my process.
An obsession with vision and a condensation of its visceral impact on the viewer is at the heart of painting—both representational and non-representational. Cubism is the movement that first engaged and affected my strategy of representation, and it forever changed the way drawing and painting relate to an experience of sight over time. Cezzane’s work most clearly embodies this obsession and for me succeeds in penetrating to something beyond the objects he studied. Marcel Duchamp’s cubist works show us the difficulty of accessing a more temporal depiction of an object and remind us of art’s limitations. M.C. Escher illustrated brilliantly the deception native to singular viewpoints. All of these artists were concerned with space and its representation on canvas or paper, and their insights continue to inform my way of looking at the world and conceptions of what is possible on a canvas.
For me the play between representational and non-representative form is not a degree of abstraction, but an investigation into object’s signification. I hope that if my objects cannot be identified as signifying blood or wood specifically that I can point out their similarities. To me, sensually perceived specificity is hierarchically more significant than subject. Paint is not intrinsically illusionistic, and where the application of it becomes literal there is potential for its surface to be specific only to itself. To combine this use of paint with illusion implies a signification of importance or dissolution of vision and proposes a mythology of experience. The foremost subjects in this mythology (and the views I find especially beautiful in my waking perception) are the boundaries of objects, disconnected from any perception of an object as a whole. Whereas Cubism showed us the difficulty of perceiving an object all at once and in reconciling temporal vision with an organized canvas, I focus my sight on the edges of substance that allow us to consider something an object at all.
Overall I borrow quite a lot of the ancient rules of illusionism, involving light sources and mild forms of perspective to render supposed three dimensional forms on a canvas, though I try to consolidate my forms with their material (paint) and use illusionism more subtly so as not to take the viewers eye too far from the painting’s surface. I think these rules are useful to suggest shattered or lumpy planes, and using them inconsistently allows me to preserve confusion in the transition between planes of a form and its boundaries as an object.
In the beginning years of my oil painting practice I invested almost all my time into completely non-representational subject matter. I wanted to free the ‘magic’ of the paint itself, and work intuitively to bind a mixture of the objects that inspire me while letting each painting direct itself and be a new experiment with materials. This way of working freed me from heavy handed conception and hesitance in my process. After having done this, I realized that to reach towards the other end of the spectrum is a valuable endeavor as well. I began to more directly reference recognizable objects, even borrowing from my photographs and preconceptions of certain subjects. This is important because though a great painting may stand on its own, it is still ultimately a referential act. I wish to do honor to the countless visions that continuously infect my aesthetic. In order for a painting to effectively defamiliarize a viewer with its subject matter, a certain grasp of that subject’s natural optic quality is necessary. The formalist use of defamiliarization, or ‘making strange’ was first used in Russian literature and when I discovered it in college study I realized that is was a precise way to attain and communicate my own awareness of beauty.
El Greco’s rendering of cloth and flesh is a good example of a very mild but effective defamiliarization. The saturated colors and jagged edges seem strange as part of religious artworks, and almost modern or out of place. This re-opens our eyes to the stark quality the cloth has on its own, or its formal quality, rather than simply serving its duty as recognizable and successful imitation. Greco’s distortion of space also relates to my interest in the use of landscape and background as a way of opening space up for the viewer to imagine inhabiting. It plays with the traditional notion of what Dave Hickey (author of “The Invisible Dragon”) called ‘renaissance space’, and twists the forms into a flatness that rejects the intrusion of the viewer. In my own work I am interested in using space like the surface of a cloth. I hope I can suggest enough recession to allow the canvas to become like a veil rather than a window.
The most important part of honestly expressing myself is doing it via a process that is defined by the form of the expression coming through it. The concerns of art history, the museum context, post-modernism, and qualms of uniqueness, individuality, and reproduction inevitably arise. Only when I forget these concerns and look at what is in front of me can I synthesize my abilities and produce work that is truly my own. Work that is a response to my whole life, not to the idea of what the work might or should be. Vision and awareness to what is now (what is new) is essential. In the end I am simply a warped mirror. And when I see someone else looking at a painting that I made, I’m excited to have no idea what they’re thinking. There’s always something new to find.