Recently I have been reformulating the concept of art in series as the main feature that cuts across the board in painting/drawing, photography, video, VR/mixed reality/holograms, and writing I have been involved in making for the past 50 years. Explorations of variations on a theme. So, it takes on then a quiet meditation of analytical study, almost, had they not been made impulsively with great improv at play towards unpredictable ends. In retrospect, the art as it exists in series seems afore thought, a foregone conclusion. Yet here it is, I, at 60 years old, just having it pop out glaringly from a jumble of many unrelated executions. An overarching unifying factor that strangely gives me peace of mind with at least the illusion of something intended or deliberate.
Art, as I practice it, lives in the tension between observation from life and the abstraction fueled by process and materials, the physicality, that was so integral to early modernists, with inspiration then stemming from other artists and elements of art history, among the environments I live in and people I meet. Above all I create artwork that is at once about the world in which I traverse and an inner journey of emotional turmoil, meditation, and self-awareness as it unfolds through the life cycle
My paintings are documents of the places where they were made. They are process documents.
Paintings and constructions explore the bread and butter of painting, the picture plane to what goes on it. There is often implicit violence in the act of destroying a canvass and reassembling it back into a construction of multiple canvasses.
Painting and drawing for me, are often figurative, with gestalt shifts creating a visual narrative. The immediacy of untethered spontaneity is crucial for the much-needed novel surprise to my eyes. I like the smell of oil paint, the texture of thick paint, the washes with mineral spirits staining a white canvas, and effects of mediums like damar or wax.
Artistic creation and destruction, express my desires beyond the manifest content. Of joy. Love. Pleasure. Beauty. Often measured with treachery, danger, fear, pain, violence, death. My work is often tethered to place of home or location.
My artistic interests include the following broad categories: Figurative, cityscape, landscape, home environments, constructions, series, multi-panel, VR/hologram, painting, drawing, photography, video, 2D digital, and writing. Such broad categories can be further broken down into sources of inspiration and explorations of world events.
Digital video and digital photography, and VR/hologram platforms such as Open Brush allow me to overcome to clunkiness and slow process of film-based mediums, and make the process from start to finish, fluid, like painting open to spontaneity and transformation through process.