2011 artist statement
November 13, 2011
The honest truth
Funky shapes that flow through the surface in an arbitrary manner come to an abrupt holt when set next to the digital worlds mouse courser, and man himself as represented through the female form, meanwhile the white of the computer screen creeps in with rectangular precision from the edges of the painting. The cold mouse courser, the illustrious female form, the ominous white computer screen, and flowing shapes are the motifs I explore in many of my paintings. My process is aesthetically conventional which means it looks like an oil painting because it is an oil painting. However, every now and then I choose to change things up a little so I use caulking as a painting medium, mouse pads, and it should be well noted that I abandon the canvas. Instead of working on canvas I work on paper a substance I feel has a stronger connection with reality and fantasy.
In order to try and understand why I paint the motifs I choose, we must first try to comprehend why I paint at all. In the past couple of works I have done, my objective was to make the painting, the painting that would end all painting, the painting that would bring the downfall of illusion and arrive at the truth. Unfortunately I realized illusion was to important for my life to just tear it all away, therefore my paintings seemed to never arrive at the truth. There was also the case that maybe I didn’t exactly know what the truth was. At that point I realized if I indeed really want to make a painting that transcended the scope of everything in life, and have I always wanted to do this? In trying to arrive at the truth I found myself wallowing in the sadness and sorrow of it all, and came to realize that people that know truth are not happy people. It’s not that ignorance is bliss, because ignorant people are still unhappy, it’s that in knowing more you develop great anguish towards the world. Why go through the painstaking effort of arriving at the truth if you can do nothing to change things? Considering art doesn’t really change anything.
There are two sides fantasy and truth, we want to know the truth, but then we need illusion to hide ourselves from it. At this point in my life I have gone too far to turn back, I couldn’t turn back even if I wanted to. On the other hand I refuse to live my life by coming face to face with evil and absolute horror on a daily basis in the pursue of reality. Therefore I shall paint in two methods, fantasy as a temporary escape from reality, and truth because I am unable to fully escape from the grasp it has on my life.
With the clarification of thought I am now able to explain why I paint the motifs that called out to me. I paint the figure and the mouse coursers as fantasy because they appear like they have been seen. In the terms that their almost identical to the real thing. On the other hand the white of the computer screen and everything it entails is painted as reality not fantasy. In the white of the computer screen being painted as reality it is truth, in the terms that it does not appear like it has been seen, but is in the process of being seen. Fantasy only gives way to fantasy, it cannot arrive at truth or it wouldn’t be a fantasy. In looking at a Jeff Koon’s painting I become depressed, because I realize maybe this fantasy is really all there is to the human being. Then I think, what about the reality, the truth of De Kooning, Mondrian, and Pollock. It must be that in this time, fantasy and truth are actually standing side by side without seeing each other that is the reality of who we are. Although fantasy cannot give way to reality there is truth behind the idea of fantasy that has become more visible in the way most of our culture plays into the illusion of a Jeff Koon’s work. As an artist who seeks the greatest reality, the most real at the moment is fantasy and reality side by side.