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ARTIST'S
STATEMENT
Other painters describe me as a 'gritty realist,' 'expressive realist'
and 'painterly realist.' I believe all the descriptions are apt because
my influences and concerns cover both extremes of the figurative tradition.
I seek particularity, description and nuance of form, but I also love
bold, brusque and vigorous paint handling and execution. I have an abiding
commitment to depicting the sensations that produce light and color and
to creating visual form and structure. On the other hand, I need to explore
content through narrative. Thus, I try to fuse all these various impulses
in my paintings and drawings.
My handling and description of form, volume and space explore the tensions
between boldness of execution versus particularity and between perception
versus invention. My paintings' surfaces are scarred, rubbed, scratched,
scrubbed, scumbled, built, destroyed and rebuilt. I want the marks and
paint to create a frenetic and visually thrilling world of events while
coalescing into architectonic and monumental form. Furthermore, I desire
my rough and raw treatment of paint and form to echo the visceral reactions
and mental states of the people depicted in my paintings, with the end
result being a fusion between the visual and psychological elements.
My intent is to explore how narrative frameworks and narrative ideas influence
each other. Often the main concern in most contemporary narrative painting
is how the form of the painting, that is, its narrative framework or structure,
conveys the ideas of the story. I am equally interested in how the narrative
ideas can express and create aesthetically exciting pictorial frameworks.
My paintings give equal importance to the specific ideas expressed in
narrative form and to the resultant form and visual structure itself.
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