Artist Statement
"To Languish in Hope"
I am a 21st Century modernist. My artworks are abstract narratives on beauty and dynamic orders that shift, change, or mutate. Geometry, structure, and relationship are my chosen language; compositional movement my vocabulary. My spoken dialect is line; abstraction the constant. Color talks. My heritage is a tradition of modernists and contemporary artists producing works of beauty, breath, and objectified presence.
My stylistic approach to art is inherently ultra-modern, structured, hard-edged, and distilled to abstraction. I seek commonalities in my subject matter, and also in my expressions. My artist vocabulary draws deeply from the universal languages of line, shape, and geometry. I am also a dynamic colorist who creates art of dimension, depth, and rhythm through visual dances of color. As well, my works (paintings, sculptures, mosaics, glass works, graphic designs, and collages) often draw from sources of nature, emotion, and beauty for inspiration, with those works often portrayed as poetic in expression.
I draw from a continuum as well: a thread of universal communication and statement winding through ancestral cultures to technologically advanced, modern societies. Since humankind’s earliest, cultural expressions, geometry and color have always been utilized as universal, communicatory expressions that transcended a specific culture (or even time period). From the beginnings of humankind expression found through drawing in sand and marking on stone, to advancement of primitive arts & decoration, to establishment of esoteric symbolism & device, to the progression of technologically-advanced structure & system, I find profound commonality. All share common expression, common truth, common mystery. My work is much about the common denominators: the language of geometry (and color) AND about that which is universally shared: expression, truth, and mystery. I seek, in my work, to strip away (through use of abstraction) the extraneous details which conceal, and to reveal, the undercurrent of statement.
Regarding sculpture: creation process for me is a matter of building relationships into a complexity, one on top of the other until a smooth integration is achieved. Although oftentimes my art expression might be initially perceived as straightforward, structural, reductive, and abstract, there is more. I aim to seamlessly weave complexities into (on initial viewing) a seemingly apparent simplicity that is incomplete. “What you see (at first glance) is (not) what you get.” My work often changes and unfurls through the multi-faceted faces of “in-the-round” sculpture. The art should behave as life, not through being stagnant, but rather breathing life through constant mutation and transformation. It does. I weave extended message into an orchestrated and flowing, visual dance in space like an adagio. I want your participation. Explore the work and my statement will unfold.
Qualifiers. We all have them, use them, make value judgements based upon them. They guide our actions and mold our work. Sometimes, they may even blind us into falsehoods and corruption. Every current art market or art movement du jour seems to enlist us as visual artists into set qualifiers of truth that often aren't. We are sold the market spoils of what is good art, what is bad art, what is to be our subject matter and techniques, and what is to be avoided. Which may radically change in the next 15 minutes. But High Art is not about buying and illustrating someone's opinion of current acquired taste; it is about solitary searching, discovering, and conveying honest expressions of truth. And for beauty? Beauty has been subjugated to a saccharin-inspired, dirty word sanctioned to back alleys in the contemporary art world. And why? Do we perhaps prefer life without beauty? In a world which seems to exponentially increase in terms of chaos, suffering, ugliness, pain, and degeneration, I instead embrace beauty and order. I am the unashamed aesthete. We, as artists, create objects of expression and objects of power. Let me create beauty and order that spills out into life and others. I have then succeeded in my task. You will never disappoint me if you tell me that my orders of expression are both beautiful and moving.
These art expressions, these aesthetic contrivances, are my created and shared objects of power: objects of meditation, dynamic mesmerizers, powerhouses with punch, and lyrical, soft-spoken labyrinths of underlying content. Let order and beauty move you if you allow.