What color is murder? What color is cancer? What color is anxiety over becoming homeless? What color is the burden of hunger? What color is the tension between estranged lovers? What color is the hope we will survive another day? What color is the black man’s plight? What color is poverty? What color is the suicidal tendency? What color is fear for another man’s life? What color is disgust at the execution of innocents for not converting? What color is a woman’s anger who must face a forced marriage? What color is a man who hurts children? What color is a hand that steals from the poor? What color is doubt that god exists? What color is the loss of a child to a passing car? What color is finding your lover with another man? What color is addiction? What color is a loss of dignity? What color is rage at the system that oppresses you? What color is the word of the man who abuses you? What color is the sun that rises over massacres? What color is the moon that bathes the dead on the fields of war? What color is the animal you struck down in the road? What color is your father on the day he passes? What color is our inability to get ahead? What color is the dream deferred? What color is unrequited love? What color is the hate crime? What color is a lie that ruins you? What color is the decision to leave? What color is the decision to stay? What color is the indecision?
I see figures that suffer as inconvenience a situ of tireless seeking; non beings reminiscent of feelings; images suffocating from vastness remaining still and alone. Figures that recede into a space not unlike memory, in proximity with shadows perhaps, cast in cold light and voluminous nondescript textures. Figures attempting to avoid identification presented with human context, with hints of anatomical insinuation with geological indications. All shapes are of nature, emergent and inevitable, lost in the continuum of time and space. All figures are possessed by presence in a vacuum with untitled tendencies. Figures appearing with traces of a name while suggesting namelessness. Figures attempting to compose a decomposition, to halt a procession, to be within from a distance, to be biological and anthropological and still manifest as assemblage. Figures that are being born in the arbitrary manner of dying from certainty toward uncertainty, presenting a limited view of a limiting relationship with solitude echoing the omnipotence of death anxiety. Figures not well balanced at all, that belie their suggestiveness, that bemoan any such thing as truth and for this reason cannot be forgiven.
The straight forward way to discuss the question, what is the inspiration for this or that work is for me that the age of reason has ramped down to full stop. This is an irrational age for me. This is my time and place as artistic expression. “I” don’t think analytically about ideas, no, I fall emotionally into frantic realities. The problematic inspiration lies here within the falling. I am not capable of analytic thinking as was the thinker of Rodin. Rather than being expectant of truths at the start of every work I am rather expectant of chaoses, of turbulent fallings into irreconcilable sufferings. In a way I think in waves of aching response. I think in the textures of discord you see. I am incapable of arriving at resolutions and this is how I see mankind – a species always in some manner of spiraling without relent. Our leaps forward are always off cliffs.
“I think” is rather a manner of experiencing the fall. In this difficult place I know great sadness but this sadness feels honest and that is what I seek most through art is a mode of being nakedly honest. My “thinker” is sad, transparently struggling as am I.
Origin(s) Of Process:
Ernest Becker said in his Pulitzer Prize winning book Denial Of Death that nature is for us terrifyingly brutal, destroying what she creates through endless life-death cycles. The grand summation of his profound life’s work is that the basic motivation of all human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death.
Out of this text I began a pursuit in 2007 to develop a medium that could stand as a critique of this fear. Developing the medium required a process true to the principles Becker espoused: To engage nature’s violent, transformative tendencies in a way that the path of creation is also the path to destruction.I’ve chosen to rely on real life death cycles in the medium to establish a platform for meditating on the impact of the “basic anxiety” on materials as they are drawn through the experience. To create the work I implement a vast array of traditional and nontraditional painting techniques. I cultivate, incubate, and manipulate aesthetically significant fields generated on a metal plate. Vital energy is amassed in accordance with a real life-death cycle for the raw material as it gives over to oxidation. All steps are time sensitive and subject to extinction. At the pinnacle of the material’s life-death cycle, the camera is used to preserve the composition achieved. A memory of the aesthetic journey as experience of the material-in-process is documented.
The resulting art object I call a process-memory document. Oxidation destroys all traces of the original moment documented. There is no original form; there is only what amounts to proof of the existence of a moment of original identity. This proof hides a secret, the aesthetic message is both ever-present and never-present. The peak moment of aesthetic meaning and message, must be documented by a camera, if it is to be brought into the world as proof of the metaphorical experience of living unto death which transpires on the metal plate. The submitted works are by necessity photographic works and each represents a pivotal moment of life unfolding across time in the space of a generative energy field (metal plate) influenced as much by the artist’s working intention as by rain, air temperature, oxygen and sunlight.