A Statement About My Art

I'm up later than usual (1:14 a.m. is "late" for me) trying to wrap my head around this artist statement I am determined to complete for my website face-lift. I'm not even sure if I want to call it that necessarily; "artist statement" just sounds so bold, and final. Either way, as I mentioned in my last post, this endeavor is not a walk in the park. How do I avoid sounding pretentious? How do I refrain from falling into the trap of solipsism? Well, we must allow for a degree of solipsism here, art to me is the personal after all. But more importantly, how do I reel people into my world and give them the right tools to get to the root of what I myself can find pretty overwhelming and overstimulating? Story-telling is important to me, and I want to engage interested and like-minded folk in the discourse of my art, and vice-versa. So here is what I've come up with, so far. This is the most honest statement I've written about my work in a very long time.

About My Work

Experimentation and play are important aspects of an artist's methodology. They help provide the kinds of "accidents" that unveil hidden connections or relationships between different forms and images. This is why I place more emphasis on the process of painting or drawing, rather than a need to have a desired effect or end-product at the very outset. Trial and error is the mechanism by which the energy of my art comes from. It draws from both my imagination and the external world around me, and is framed by a subconscious negotiation of these two worlds. I like to think of my work as fragmented outcomes of a unified search for the unknowledge that gets lodged between what I know and what I don't know (a "missing nothing"). What takes place in this dynamic space between the known (the physical world from which I take my subject) and the unknown (its limitless potential for transformation) is what I try to unleash through my work. It is in this space where I am free to manipulate my materials and subject matter--and in the process discover new techniques and facets of expression--until it becomes something uniquely of my own creation.