Perfect paintings for the back of any closet, crawl space, or basement. (More words about art below, but first, the art...)
I am, among other things, a person who puts paint onto various surfaces. My work could be described as abstract, ironic, gestural, viscerally inconsistent, glibly existential, and — according to my daughter — so pretty.
You can learn everything you need to know about my paintings by just looking at them. But if it’s important to you to get my take on the philosophical underpinnings of my art (boring), your best bet is to just corner me and start asking pointed questions.
I’m too polite (cowardly) to walk away, so you'll probably get answers, reluctant though they may be.
In the meantime, my “artist statement” is simple…
I make stuff I want to hang on my walls. If other people want to hang it on their walls, too, we can make that happen. Maybe.
Let me expand at the risk of sounding pedantic and self-important…
Most importantly in day-to-day life, ‘What is art’ is a domestic question. Sure it can be bandied about in public discourse like it’s culturally important. (Which it is? A little bit? Maybe?) But when and how do most of us really experience art?
At home! Sitting in the living room or lying in bed or looking through our shower doors at whatever’s above the toilet. It’s the walls of our own houses and apartments where we interact the most often and the most directly with visual art.
And that’s what I want to create for. Blank walls. Ideally blank walls in the spaces where people feel free to put down the facade of caring about “important” art and just want things to make them feel comfortable, remind them of something they felt one time, and maybe but not necessarily spark a conversation or two.
In this scenario, ’What is art’ stops being a big, philosophical question and becomes a personal one instead. Like I said, it’s a domestic question. It’s most interesting when it's asked between partners over a second bottle of wine, not by critics holding forth in articles that only 23 people read, editor included.
Art is whatever you and your co-habitators think is worth hammering a nail into the wall for. If that’s one of my paintings, awesome. If it’s a live-laugh-love mirror from Bed Bath and Beyond, you know what, go wild. Be you. That’s awesome, too.