Statement
My paintings emerge from a determination to make art that can stand up to the rigors of “official” art world aesthetic judgment and critique, while still possessing the visual impact and oomph necessary to engage the vernacular glance of the everyday viewer. My goal, accordingly, is to make paintings that operate within and contribute to the discourses of fine art, while also being just plain cool enough to be worth looking at by a viewer who, whether formally learned in contemporary art or not, is visually sophisticated from a lifetime of iconographic and logotypic training via mass media and corporate design.
Building on this notion, if today even an informed and interested art viewer might give a painting only a few seconds of attention, I believe the work should be fully present enough in its moment to reward a viewer’s intensive, flashbulb burst of focus. This has led me to create artworks with an in-your-face visual terseness, constituting short attention span paintings for short attention span culture. That's not to say there aren't things going on for a viewer who wants to look deeper, however. In addition to navigating the above disjunctions—cool to look at vs. discursively dense, and fast-glance vs. slow consideration—I work also to create a hybrid of abstract depth and activated flatness. To my mind such a mode of painterly space is less similar to Renaissance-style pictorial depth or to flat, modernist opticality, than to the flatnesses of tabbed, multilayered representations of information space in a browser window. That said, however, like in-jokes or Easter eggs in a movie, such elements are there if people want to find them, but ideally are not necessary for a viewer’s engagement with the work. My hope is that viewers will take from or read into the paintings whatever works best for them.
My paintings emerge from a determination to make art that can stand up to the rigors of “official” art world aesthetic judgment and critique, while still possessing the visual impact and oomph necessary to engage the vernacular glance of the everyday viewer. My goal, accordingly, is to make paintings that operate within and contribute to the discourses of fine art, while also being just plain cool enough to be worth looking at by a viewer who, whether formally learned in contemporary art or not, is visually sophisticated from a lifetime of iconographic and logotypic training via mass media and corporate design.
Building on this notion, if today even an informed and interested art viewer might give a painting only a few seconds of attention, I believe the work should be fully present enough in its moment to reward a viewer’s intensive, flashbulb burst of focus. This has led me to create artworks with an in-your-face visual terseness, constituting short attention span paintings for short attention span culture. That's not to say there aren't things going on for a viewer who wants to look deeper, however. In addition to navigating the above disjunctions—cool to look at vs. discursively dense, and fast-glance vs. slow consideration—I work also to create a hybrid of abstract depth and activated flatness. To my mind such a mode of painterly space is less similar to Renaissance-style pictorial depth or to flat, modernist opticality, than to the flatnesses of tabbed, multilayered representations of information space in a browser window. That said, however, like in-jokes or Easter eggs in a movie, such elements are there if people want to find them, but ideally are not necessary for a viewer’s engagement with the work. My hope is that viewers will take from or read into the paintings whatever works best for them.
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