It is so easy to get caught up in the details and semantics:
I want to learn more about business.
I want to learn more techniques.
I want to learn more about history, and what other painters explored – visually and mentally.
I want to learn what I don’t know that I don’t know.
But none of that explains what I hope to achieve with the life I have been given. I strive to show the Truth of this moment in time. A camera is an objective thing, showing a moment without context or emotion. A painting is a subjective viewpoint, with the capability in the color, method, technique, and style to show the deeper truths within a moment in time.
Exploring the life of a painting mentally through more then my life, past the lifetime of the patron, beyond a century, and through all of its own life. Knowing that this isn’t possible, to mentally achieve expectation or understanding, but to make conscious decisions to guide that life. An oil painting designed to crack in layers, a winter scene below and a spring scene above, as the painting ripens, it turns to fall with the layers of dust and smoke and life over it, tinting it and leaves the scene of bareness below as it literally falls away. Creating work that is not intended to be preserved, but to be lived with.
Sometimes, I have noticed, a project demands to be created. My series Extra Artist on the Set of Fat Kid Rules the World was one of those projects. I was a conduit for an idea larger then myself and a vision that reached through time and space. The images demanded themselves and the project evolved from on set sketches to paintings to full installations. I am like a piece of wood floating on the rapids in the midst of such projects: With only the slightest ability to guide it, I am along for the ride and to provide a human context, a face, and a voice.
Other projects require a more involved mindset. They involve funding and applications, discovering and wooing collaborators, organizing and documenting. It requires a vision of the goal. It needs to be broken into achievable pieces and requires a visionary to keep solving the problems as they rise, to keep the larger goal in mind, to inspire others, and to coordinate the pieces until the vision is complete and shared with the world.
When the self-propelled project sweeps me away, I gratefully enjoy the ride, but it is a rare pleasure that can not be depended on. To this point in my career, I have enjoyed the strange trips that my art has forced me to take, and treadded water in between, waiting for the next wave. I would like to stop waiting, and learn to fill my life with many projects, the pieces flying around me inpiring each other and taking on a life beyond my limited reach.
My work revolves around the interaction between the arts. The work that comes from my brush is inspired by the visions I have seen, but it is subconsciously inspired by the music I am listening to, the movie I saw last night, the season and the studio I am working in. My work is often inspired by musicians, dancers, theatrical productions, religious ceremonies, and movie shoots…by other people seeking truth. I would like to close the circle and introduce my visual art to the world with installations that include auditory cues and staged experiences: Creating an individual and multifaceted subconscious association with the visual image. I think that people have habitual modes of thinking. Seeing a painting on a white wall with unobtrusive music leads to associations that are within the scope of the individuals normal, everyday habitual thinking. By creating controlled environments, with musical and sound effects for each painting and shills among the guests bring up specified reactions and interactions, it shock the individual into an association that is outside their habitual modes, creating a new thought pattern that will remain a mental path walked for the rest of their lives. A moment of truth beyond their normal selves.
Please leave a comment, critique, or conceptual discussion point. This is a draft and I need your help to refine it.
