Statement
My paintings arise from a desire to make art that can stand up to the rigors of the art world’s 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 meme culture.
Corollary to this goal is the role of attention: if today even an informed and interested art viewer might give an artwork 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 works with an in-your-face visual terseness, which I call short attention span paintings for short attention span culture. That’s not to say there aren’t things going on to reward the attention of 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—the space of the paintings is important as well. With each painting I work to create a hybrid of abstract depth and activated flatness, creating a mode of painterly space less similar to Renaissance-style pictorial depth or flat, modernist opticality, than to the stacked flatnesses of tabbed information space. That said, however, like in-jokes or Easter eggs in a movie, these elements are present if people want to find or know to look for 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 arise from a desire to make art that can stand up to the rigors of the art world’s 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 meme culture.
Corollary to this goal is the role of attention: if today even an informed and interested art viewer might give an artwork 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 works with an in-your-face visual terseness, which I call short attention span paintings for short attention span culture. That’s not to say there aren’t things going on to reward the attention of 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—the space of the paintings is important as well. With each painting I work to create a hybrid of abstract depth and activated flatness, creating a mode of painterly space less similar to Renaissance-style pictorial depth or flat, modernist opticality, than to the stacked flatnesses of tabbed information space. That said, however, like in-jokes or Easter eggs in a movie, these elements are present if people want to find or know to look for 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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