Precision

What kills me about so many great artists is the precision of their words in handling difficult and elusive concepts. This is just tonight's example. There's always a little poetic joy in my mind (tiny parade) when I see another artist take a word like a pushpin to their work.

Jonathan Lasker

Artist's Statement

Here I go, at it again. I swear I've really nailed it this time. Before I edited, first I made a catalogue of all the paintings I consider "my best". Thankfully, they all made sense together AND erased a lot of the anxiety I tend to feel when the lesser paintings are included. This is the benefit to being brutal. So I'm not going to post the statement but I do think it's interesting to look at the keywords in it. This list could probably stand on its own as a statement.

Chasing, earnest, wonder, natural, frivolous, dark, brutal, power, nature, horrible, ridiculous, consumption, whipping, playground, mania, awe, clarity, humor, frolic, process, mastication, landscape, playful, stripping, abstraction, freedom, new, strange, specific, novelty, absurdly, project, discovery, painting, impossible, color, seduces, confounds, unseen, terrain, explore.

Boom, shaka...laka?

When I speak their language I fail

See me drift mid-sentence

Know where I am headed:

Between pages, between glances (how geometry was born)

Past that blinding light, there must be something to see

once your eyes adjust

The energy within and the energy around

Places your waking life has stolen

Something inside, something that must be freed

A rotten edifice that must be destroyed

A celebration hall, festooned but uninhabited

An abandoned house, deep within the woods

The flickering of light on the leaves

dancing, almost mocking

as they obscure but become your vision

A bed of many fabrics, an array of elixirs

Make-believe, a silly place, a sudden place

a realization, a recognition

a premonition, a pattern writ

A space destroyed with a wave

of an indelicate hand

A radical light, a power

A skeptic searching for a potent spell

Where any object can take on this living quality

this breathing color

This THING, this thing that sneaks up on me

This strange beauty that lurks around the corner

This shape-shifter of meaning, this house of lunatic potentials

and renegade spectrums and spectral renegades

You and I, the only eyes

You and I, the spark, the source

You and I, so patient, so HUNGRY

Bombastic Fantastic

Just got done writing new artist's statement. It's a delicate balance between sounding like a goober and totally not getting your point across. I have to stop myself from getting sucked into the writing and making some huge arc in my explanation. I always think, "this time I got it just right, more direct and too the point" and then I come back later and read it. Yeesh. It's not that I ever get it wrong, per se...I just always want to roll my eyes at the language just a little. First sentence from my last one:

My paintings are born out of the friction between the epic and the absurd, the

grand and the mundane.

new one:

Through abstraction, I bring dimension to impossible combinations of color and form.

I really do just have to breathe a little before I write and not try to cram it all in one sentence. "Born out of the friction" though...how can you fight a phrase like that when it comes to you? for real though...nobody gets to use epic, grand, absurd and mundane in the first sentence of their artist's statement. Nobody.