I’ve recently signed on with an online gallery called Singulart. I’m told they are big in Europe, they have a very sleek looking website, and they also have quite a bit of positive press. I think it is a good sign when one of the things that pops up when you Duck Duck Go a company is their job listings. It signals growth. I also was pleased that the very first thing they wanted from me when I timidly read their opening email was to ask me to get on the phone. Anyway, I’m filling out my artist profile page on their site now, and in the biography section they answer a few questions to which I didn’t have ready made answers and so have just written a few paragraphs about my work that I thought you all might enjoy.
Please let me know if you have had any experience with Singulart, what you think of these answers to their questions, and also let me know how you are holding it together in these troubling times. I know I’m not a very good in-the-moment public figure. I figure you get that all over the place, and what I’m good at is making these paintings and sometimes talking about them. So, here are some words about some paintings:
- What was your first experience with/discovery of art? What made you want to become an artist?
As a child I was always encouraged to paint and draw. As a family, I think we were a little proud of the artistic ability we had both on my mother and father's side. My first experience that really made me want to become an artist was when I went to a pre-college art program at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh between my junior and senior years of high school. It was a six week program and it was like a little taste of what it would be like to go to art school. We had oil-painting classes with live models and conceptual classes where we learned the term "site specific installation" as a way to justify putting something together that you were not quite sure you'd be able to transport anywhere else. It was also my first time meeting people who actually made their livings as artists. The instructors were not only brilliant and eccentric and cooler than any adults I'd ever met before, they were also real people and they were alive! I had always thought of artists as people who had paintings in museums and who had been dead for a long time. From that point on I knew that being an artist was going to be an important part of my life; it is part of being alive for me, part of being a part of what's going on.
- Are there any key themes, messages or theories behind your work?
As a human, I am fundamentally not satisfied with the explanations I have been given for what is happening and why. Growing up, my parents tried (half-heartedly, I think) to instill a belief in Christian mythology in me, but it never took. I have more than my fair share of science education and will excitedly get into conversations about quantum tunneling and Hawking radiation (don't get me started on the two slits experiment!), but the big answers are not there either. My work is an attempt to suggest some possible ways of being, some possible ways the world might work. It is a self conscious offering of answers while knowing that no answers are possible. It's a bit like reading tea-leaves of coffee grounds or the entrails of a split open animal to figure out what the gods are up to. This may sound flip, but I mean to do this very earnestly. The great power of abstraction is its capacity to boot-strap the creation of entirely self-contained realities inside the picture plane. I mean to create some of these possible realities such that they might provide a place for meditative thought, or, ideally, no thought at all.
- Could you tell us a bit about your artistic approach? (Style, medium and specific techniques.)
I would like to believe that the one thing that is constant in my work is that nothing is constant, but there are certain things that have remained unchanged for the past decade or so. My style tends to be messy, colorful, and abstract. I like to use a variety of mark making techniques and tools. My paintings tend to be composed of several layers. My most recent body of work incorporates repetitive mark making or patterns, a grid of squares or hexagons for example, juxtaposed with biomorphic drawing and layered of poured paint which act in opposition to each other to create a sense of volume within the picture plane. These paintings are done largely in acrylic on raw (un-primed) canvas, and also occasionally incorporate dye, Sharpie marker, and/or collage into the composition.
My process is intuitive, spontaneous, and iterative. I do not come to a canvas with a preconception of how I want the painting to look. The act of making the painting is an act of discovery and development. I often have multiple pieces going at once, or one large piece and several smaller ones so that when the urge strikes me to perform a maneuver that does not fit in the piece I'm currently working on I can go and do it on one of the others. Or if an action in one painting inspires a curiosity about what could happen by trying the same thing but in a slightly different way, I can again go and try that on a different piece. Thus ideas and inspiration flow from one piece to the next.
- Please write a personal quote/sentence that best represents you as an artist (in your own words, max. 30 words.)
My work is an attempt to suggest possible ways of being. It is a self conscious offering of answers while knowing that answers do not exist.