History does not dictate the future, it informs it.
I do not strive to be an Avant-garde, nor am I reactive or conservative in my aims in art either. This is not to say I am ignorant of the art world or history, rather I am simply attempting to work through ideas and scenes of personal interest. The act of putting pigment to surface inarguably is tied and defined by the history of painting, a history wide and varied.
As any other artist has, I take all I can from the artists I revere. The liveliness Rembrandt was able to put into his drawings, showing not only his care for his models but also the deftness with which he worked. The approach of early twentieth century American artists such as Edward Hopper and Fairfield Porter, using flat washes of color and simplified form to homogenize the scene greatly informs my own sensibility. David Hockney’s work as well draws on similar simplification of form and flat painting however it is his productivity and large body of work that is of greatest impress.
I understand history well enough that I can draw from it without drowning under its weight or obsessing with my place in it. My goal as an artist is to maintain a dedicated practice of working and continue to progress my abilities. I seek to make art that reveals my own life and experiences, creating work as an exploration of individuality and to reveal the universality of human experience. I intend to avoid being trapped by trends of fashion, creating work which is both aesthetically sound and readily understandable. Appreciation of art should not require a college level career in art, literature and philosophy to understand, the visual elements of the image ought to be all that the viewer requires. One can best relate to images they know or are familiar to them and that idea is a factor in my choices of subject. Throughout my everyday life I record the people and places which attract my gaze with a camera or on paper. By using drawing as the first step of a painting I set out the fundamentals of an image, then adding layers of paint to create mood and fulfill the needs of the image. The images I create reveal their source or inspiration without sacrificing the material aspects of the paint; every layer exposing the works history. The scenes depicted become a compilation of my experiences; a lone oil rig on the plains, an abandoned building, the wide expanses passed in a life in transit. My aspirations are not so lofty as to place myself among the multi-millionaire artists of my time. I seek only to capture what is important to me because it is what I know and what I desire.
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