Artist’s Statement
There are a number of threads I pull when building visual images, including: non-verbal communicative power that the visual arts share with music and dance; historical, theoretical and critical ideas that intersect with our contemporary reality; and the characteristics of the various media I utilize and how they can become a concrete artifact of thinking over the course of time.
Music and dance have clear analogs in the visual arts: rhythm, repetition, improvisation, melody and harmony, and even syncopation. Beyond those formal elements, these artistic disciplines are able to communicate at a pre- and non-discursive level that is simultaneously more fundamental and more expansive than direct verbal communication, something that is shared with the visual arts. The music of innovators like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Fela Kuti or Poncho Sánchez help me find a mental state that allows ideas, colors, and new visual relationships to be known.
I believe that the writings of critics, theoreticians, historians, and the work of artists can provide an essential conceptual context for engaging in current issues and trends in human existence and art making. For example, three that resonate with me are Gianni Vattimo, Diana Coole, and the work of the 20th century biomorphic/anthropomorphic abstractionists. Vattimo’s treatise End of Modernity explores the philosophical and historical underpinnings of modernity and its trajectory and how postmodernity responds to its shortcomings. Coole’s response to Habermas’ essay on the project of modernity makes a compelling case for the value of the postmodern response and provides potential trajectories for postmodern thought to continue to act as a ballast and even complement to the tenets of modernity. The work of Miró, Gorky, De Kooning and many others has intrigued me since I was a child and still provides inspiration and ideas for our current age.
I work primarily in oil paint, acrylic, casein, and printmaking, and each of these media has unique characteristics that can be leveraged to create images and marks that are unique to that specific media. Working across these media with similar imagery and ideas creates a symbiotic conversation between the media that helps me bring to the surface the strengths of one medium while informing the use of the others. This approach also echoes some of the writings of Henri Bergson as he explores thinking across time, and as these images are built up over time they become a physical manifestation of that thinking and record of ‘captured’ time.
A related thread draws upon the thinking of postmodernist theorists which among other things contend that traditional modernist conceptual frameworks and power structures are inherently insufficient to engage with lived experience, both in terms of the views of communities and have existed outside those power structures, and those aspects of human experience that do not yield to verbal description and therefore remain largely outside modern rationalist thought.
One final note in light of the coordinated rise of fascist tendencies within certain groups in the world’s oldest and strongest liberal democracies over the past several years: abstract art – particularly abstract art that draws upon forward thinking ideas, that aspires to provide an opening to the understanding and appreciation of beauty and a richer life experience, that engages the viewer in a way that allows them to think about and respond to art in new and unique ways – is inherently anti-fascist. History has repeatedly shown us that fascist actors extinguish intellectual endeavors, exile or eliminate those seen at the forefront of cultural development and creation, and destroy art objects that do not conform to the propagandistic dictates of fascist power centers. As such, creating abstract art becomes an affirmation of the values that are fundamental to full human experience.