Artist Statement
The main thrust of my art examines the act of perception, the moment when what we are looking at gains meaning. A love of picture making, coupled with an interest in contemporary concepts, early on brought my attempts to fuse these themes together. I wanted to make work that had a high level of pictorial verisimilitude while being able to function primarily on a non-objective, abstract mode. The ascendancy of one style of painting over the previous style in the late 19th and early 20th centuries accelerated the development of artistic styles and approaches. By the 1950s the non-objective had displaced portrayal. As the picture began to reappear in painting in the 1960s it often made social commentary. Simultaneously the notion of a dominant style began to fracture. Formalism led to Pluralism and soon "anything goes" was the style...including even the Realist image. With the advent of Photo-realism, the circle of Modernism was complete: abstract patches of color, faithfully copied from photos, conspiring to create a perfect simulacrum of visual reality. It was okay to paint pictures again. If Modernism was the quest for the new, what did a return to the oldest form of art making--portrayal--mean? To me, and others, it inaugurated the Post-modern.
Aesthetic gene-splicing, as you might see in a glass and steel high-rise--with gothic arches or a "Chippendale" corniche--opened a way to recover so many babies thrown out with the bathwater during Modernism's rush towards newness. In the broad arc of the history of art, Modernism's worship of the new didn't liberate as much as it might have. The modern world of nuclear physics and fossil fuels was certainly accompanied by ensuing problems. Modern communications brought varying world views into the light of reason. East meets West. Zen meets Rationalism. Competition meets cooperation. Economic theories from the 18th and 19th centuries clash in the 20th and show a middle path by illuminating their sharp contrasts--and sharp edges. Really, it's all so...so...California. This cross-cultural richness, coupled with the natural beauty and wonderful climate, especially here in the San Francisco Bay Area, is why I live in California.
The cross-pollination of the varied aesthetics developed through 30,000 years of the distinctly human activity of art making has just gotten started. My work tries to brush up against some of these ideas. I believe that this broad and inclusive Post-modern world view will ultimately produce a brave new art, such as the work on the following pages.
The main thrust of my art examines the act of perception, the moment when what we are looking at gains meaning. A love of picture making, coupled with an interest in contemporary concepts, early on brought my attempts to fuse these themes together. I wanted to make work that had a high level of pictorial verisimilitude while being able to function primarily on a non-objective, abstract mode. The ascendancy of one style of painting over the previous style in the late 19th and early 20th centuries accelerated the development of artistic styles and approaches. By the 1950s the non-objective had displaced portrayal. As the picture began to reappear in painting in the 1960s it often made social commentary. Simultaneously the notion of a dominant style began to fracture. Formalism led to Pluralism and soon "anything goes" was the style...including even the Realist image. With the advent of Photo-realism, the circle of Modernism was complete: abstract patches of color, faithfully copied from photos, conspiring to create a perfect simulacrum of visual reality. It was okay to paint pictures again. If Modernism was the quest for the new, what did a return to the oldest form of art making--portrayal--mean? To me, and others, it inaugurated the Post-modern.
Aesthetic gene-splicing, as you might see in a glass and steel high-rise--with gothic arches or a "Chippendale" corniche--opened a way to recover so many babies thrown out with the bathwater during Modernism's rush towards newness. In the broad arc of the history of art, Modernism's worship of the new didn't liberate as much as it might have. The modern world of nuclear physics and fossil fuels was certainly accompanied by ensuing problems. Modern communications brought varying world views into the light of reason. East meets West. Zen meets Rationalism. Competition meets cooperation. Economic theories from the 18th and 19th centuries clash in the 20th and show a middle path by illuminating their sharp contrasts--and sharp edges. Really, it's all so...so...California. This cross-cultural richness, coupled with the natural beauty and wonderful climate, especially here in the San Francisco Bay Area, is why I live in California.
The cross-pollination of the varied aesthetics developed through 30,000 years of the distinctly human activity of art making has just gotten started. My work tries to brush up against some of these ideas. I believe that this broad and inclusive Post-modern world view will ultimately produce a brave new art, such as the work on the following pages.