artist statement

I paint, because I love to paint. I paint because I am compelled to. Art is the longest and most significant relationship in my life. My paintings are my passionate experience and expression of my self. People often ask me what my art is about. I have resisted this for as long as I can remember because describing what a piece of art means to me creates a cage around it. Oftentimes I am not trying to communicate any explicit message - If I am, it is usually fairly obvious. I use imagery, color and symbol juxtaposition to create new meaning that is perched somewhere outside the realm of the linguistic.

The art is about you. I have already had my way with it. I put it in public to give you the opportunity to have your own unique experience of it. Treat it like you would Rorschach. When you are looking at it, how does it make you feel? Does it make you think of anything? Are you confounded by its absurdity? Do you feel confused, angry, embarrassed, hostile, irritated, judgmental, pissed off, turned on. Do you feel happy, joyous, amused, do you feel like laughing out loud? Do you feel nothing at all? Poke around inside of yourself. That is where the meaning is, not necessarily in what I have to say about it.

Standards of beauty and value vary widely throughout history. They vary by species, region, culture, and other miscellany. Thus, “good” and “bad” are arbitrary assignments designed to reinforce the tyranny and hierarchy of judgment based on cultural, personal, political and historic bias. Being able to state my likes and dislikes without comparison or validation, is a practice I struggle with daily.

Art is not written language or school or a book. The institutionalization of art usurps our ability to value our experience of it. It asks us to rely on what the museum tag states is the artist’s intention and it presupposes that only the Academics are privy to its “meaning”. Art is more than what a history book asserts as its meaning in retrospect. It is more than a verbal analysis of images. It is more than the life of the artist. Art is an entity unto itself. And looking at art should not be a test of the viewer’s ability to decode the externalization of an internal symbol system peculiar to the artist. The inflexible notion that art always has a “meaning” specifically and narrowly bound to the intention of an artist does great disservice to our collective and social relationship with art. I believe art should belong to the people - not just to academics and dealers.

One Love