What are my paintings about?
They are maps. They locate things within a space and form sets of relationships between things in the world. They are about being me, here, now! They relate to things and people around me and the thoughts and ideas that inform those relationships. They are about the freedom to choose and decide, to create meaning by doing so.
The function is of discursive formations between images, gestures, signs, symbols in a fluid, contingent and multi-layered network of meanings and possible relationships. They incorporate, on the same picture plane, a mixture of historical reference, auto-biography and sub-cultural content in a shifting soup of knowledge, conjecture, opinion, guesswork, and the irrational.
The ‘arena’ of the picture plane, although implying one section of an infinite extension, is a site for a merging of emotional states, conceptual ideas, memories and autobiography, where the nature of knowledge and understanding is contested and the connections between ‘events’ within that space create space for potential new relationships of meaning.
Disparate elements allow for networking of possibilities, akin to the nature of the Mind, that reflect the problem-solving and pattern recognition search of our innate way of existing in the world. Any inherent cohesion is somewhat hermetic, oft times illogical, but is reformulated by the active participation of the mind viewing it. This is not an acceptance of the ’subjective’, as an all-is-acceptable interpretation, but rather a realism based acknowledgment of the non-linear and historical set of the organization of the brain’s ordering processes.
The paintings therefore exist as a set of questions and possibilities, not answers, that offer up multiple avenues for non-didactic exchanges of potentialities. Meaning is based on truth being diverse and conflicted, on strategies of associative connection and cultural structures.
An extended introduction?..... The basis for my paintings is an intertextual examination of my own mortality, as seen through the merging contradictions of the disparate elements and influences of my life. This interpenetration occurs when the histories of abstract mark making, an ongoing developing iconography and sub-cultural motifs are placed in relationships on the picture plane. Colloquialisms and urban vernacular appear alongside art history, references to Brutalist architecture, comic books, skateboards, motorcycle club life, etc to explore a masculine identity within a transient lifetime. This allows for an extended and negotiated dialogue between ideas of the political and class division, race, sub-cultural resistance and tribalism, via a curatorial-type selection and arrangement on the picture plane.
They are maps. They locate things within a space and form sets of relationships between things in the world. They are about being me, here, now! They relate to things and people around me and the thoughts and ideas that inform those relationships. They are about the freedom to choose and decide, to create meaning by doing so.
The function is of discursive formations between images, gestures, signs, symbols in a fluid, contingent and multi-layered network of meanings and possible relationships. They incorporate, on the same picture plane, a mixture of historical reference, auto-biography and sub-cultural content in a shifting soup of knowledge, conjecture, opinion, guesswork, and the irrational.
The ‘arena’ of the picture plane, although implying one section of an infinite extension, is a site for a merging of emotional states, conceptual ideas, memories and autobiography, where the nature of knowledge and understanding is contested and the connections between ‘events’ within that space create space for potential new relationships of meaning.
Disparate elements allow for networking of possibilities, akin to the nature of the Mind, that reflect the problem-solving and pattern recognition search of our innate way of existing in the world. Any inherent cohesion is somewhat hermetic, oft times illogical, but is reformulated by the active participation of the mind viewing it. This is not an acceptance of the ’subjective’, as an all-is-acceptable interpretation, but rather a realism based acknowledgment of the non-linear and historical set of the organization of the brain’s ordering processes.
The paintings therefore exist as a set of questions and possibilities, not answers, that offer up multiple avenues for non-didactic exchanges of potentialities. Meaning is based on truth being diverse and conflicted, on strategies of associative connection and cultural structures.
An extended introduction?..... The basis for my paintings is an intertextual examination of my own mortality, as seen through the merging contradictions of the disparate elements and influences of my life. This interpenetration occurs when the histories of abstract mark making, an ongoing developing iconography and sub-cultural motifs are placed in relationships on the picture plane. Colloquialisms and urban vernacular appear alongside art history, references to Brutalist architecture, comic books, skateboards, motorcycle club life, etc to explore a masculine identity within a transient lifetime. This allows for an extended and negotiated dialogue between ideas of the political and class division, race, sub-cultural resistance and tribalism, via a curatorial-type selection and arrangement on the picture plane.