Pretty Crazy

An artist should not be allowed to speak about their own work it should speak for itself. I completely adhere to the view that a work should be self-defining, explanations should be included with the piece. For example. a typed essay could accompany a piece but it must be presented as a part of the work. This is the job of the artist, to prepare his/her statement and leave it up for interpretation. It is not their job to wait around for the viewer's reaction and argue points after-the-fact.

"Horse and Hattock"

an urban distaste for the concrete

Sketches can be preserved as legends to stories, and paintings serve as a code with which to read the meaning behind an artist's work.
Within my interests is a specific concern with language. what could be the possibility of a common language of the subconscious? Misinterpretations abound within the language of visual symbols. In the end, words "mean" nothing, they have no value in terms of material worth. Beyond matters of currency, however, I would say most people today have developed "an urban distaste for the concrete" (a line from the Great Gatsby).

Self-organizing

Art is: the opposite of carelessness. This piece could be described as a series of pigment application moving towards cohesion. The horizon is at once distance and boundary. The obvious conclusion is that if you believe the whole painting, then the whole thing is true. The act of imagining a good story is a way to make someone, including oneself, feel safe forever. Gravity can paint a picture, through time and natural processes. Like fear, gravity is a common denominator; it is also a connected to natural phenomena and creation. Decay, cultural and social decay is the same as oversimplification on such a grand scale that the basics of life have become abstract "concepts". Art is a circular idea process of formation and deterioration. Self-organizing matter is the secret.

just like a photo

Images have become disposable. Possibly because of this we often seem to have trouble investing in our decisions or anything at all that we may choose. In a rather victimizing way our societal convention is to take what's given to us. I don't mean to condemn all connections to vain behavior, they're merely symptoms of a larger disorder, but I do wish to find the means to make stronger statements. Without being overly critical, I believe there is much to be learned by objectification. So many people would rather choose a private struggle than a public humiliation as we search for that fortune, nirvana, or revolution always just out of reach. But to be afraid of what you might "look like" while doing it seems to me an irrational fear. In the same way people shy away from the camera len,s many of us shy away from taking the "harder route". However, fear is the ultimate teacher, a natural state and a tool. We all fear the unknown; fear is our common denominator.
In this way I believe that people often fear the abstract, the borderline or the hard to understand. In my own works, what is veiled may or may not have meaning in the first place, the veiwer will never know. Is that not-knowing feeling a form of fear? It is at least uneasiness.
Through comforting familarity the photograph remains to most the purest visual record of a concrete moment in time.

To leave a mark

Affecting a surface is essentially the subject of the act of painting. Presence and absence are binaries; represented as equally oppositional forces. On any surface the discovery of a mark is the dicovery of difference. Some may say the result of this marking is to be "condemned to an eternal desire for the non-relationship." In other words, zero; where identity is meaningless.

avoidance

As a society we instinctively avoid many things during the course of the day. Somtimes we are aware of it, but most of the time we do not know how automatic our daily behaviors have become. On studying social reactions to different versions of the human figure, an uncanny appetite for irony can be revealed. We like to see things that we have already seen before. Our tendency towards the familiar is in complete combat with exploration in an urban situation.