A Statement.

So, I recently had to work up an artist's statement. I'm not necessarily good at this sort of thing. Which is not surprising when you consider that one of the main reasons I started this blog was to address my big doubts about the importance of art making. Had I been more candid with the statement it would have contained

"I wish I were a writer!"

"If I had any proverbial balls I'd probably be a grafitti artist!"

and "Speaking of balls... having finally convinced someone to rest his balls on my eyes just so that I could see what it would feel like, I am no longer sure what my main goal in life is!"

Nonetheless, here is my statement, if you'd like to get a better idea of what I'm driving at with all of these images...

........................................................................

Most of the visual art that inspires me is wearing away.

I have long been strongly drawn to old signage and advertising murals, the kind that have been painted in layers over layers and have broken down over the years, top layers thinning to show the older letters and brick beneath. I am also interested in graffiti and in other, more ambiguous markings; the codes on the sides of trains, the no-longer-legible promises of old business signs, the single, red number or name on the steel base of high tension powerlines.

To me the fragmented images and words of these murals and other signage are like snippets of overheard conversation. How we absorb and react to the seemingly arbitrary and jumbled stimuli that we encounter haphazardly in the course of our day says, I think, a lot about how we build and interpret our lives and communicate with one and other. These fragments are the stuff of idea and inspiration, and I have never figured out a way to make art that can do anything more important than a glimpse of the word "Quality" on a passing freight train can do.

This is all fine and good, and is reflected in the worn and wordy backgrounds of my paintings but might, I suppose, leave one wondering why Ive got these hyper-realistic birds as the central figures of my work. I began painting birds as a continuation of my figurative and portrait work. I had been extensively painting people in somewhat oblique, active poses, looking like partial details from larger narrative paintings. I turned to birds as a way to examine expression, movement, posture and gesture in what felt like a more pure and universal form: without the loaded associations with specific peoples identities.

As this series of painitngs develops I realize that birds are more compatible with the afforementioned public art and infrastructure than I'd realized. Birds are, by nature, both easily accessible and difficult to observe. They surround us, and are far more public creatures than almost any other wild animal, and yet by nature they are elusive they are often too high, fast or evasive for us to observe for very long. The birds that dominate my compositions function not unlike the pieces of dialog, signage or architecture that I draw such inspiration from. They pass through our lines of attention unexpectedly and inexplicably, briefly. They allow us glimpses of their activities which are often ambiguous but also universal: they carry and wait, they feed, they call and they fight. They are ubiquitous but transient, and it isnt hard to endow them with a sort of omnipotence.

All around, my paintings are my attempt to add something striking to the clipped, mysterious, difficult and beautiful narrative world that we all move through. I hope that, much as the tail end of a sentence overheard on a bus leads a listener to wonder what the rest of the conversation was about, the contents of my work might lead a viewer to imagine a larger context or a continued tale. My titles probably best betray this hope; they are lines from longer pieces of writing that relate, at least for me, to the bird, word or story of the paintings they label.

They may seem arbitrary but rest assured, even if you cant quite tell what the whole story is there is still, most certainly, a story.

....................................................

And then I wrote something about the owl painting that's displayed below. This was mainly in response to someone who said that my titles had nothing to do with the paintings (the owl is called "Wind like a clock, tell me it's just about time"). Here 'tis:


Wind Up. 7/19

Even while you have been waiting, you have been moving by night.
All the while you have been moving by night, you have been waiting.

Now you can roll out with more precision than a pre-dawn strike, collect things that would shine were they shone on. You target and salvage, you execute turns tight as knots and you revel, casting no shadow.

Your eyes are honed and your speed barely stirs the air but there has been this growing pause. A sneaking feeling: that maybe to wait, save and simmer so quietly has been terribly dangerous. A sin against potential and maybe you have been compromised, waited too long.

Now it is time to think about bravery. It was supposed to be brave to move through thick, dark night, solo moonlit, but was it? There are things that you have put off. You were going to mother the millions, or children, to minister or heal. Of you were going to go boldly into a clearer war with something altruistic in your pocket, a scrap of belief or the photo of something worth alighting for.

Around you they are winding up and they tell you it is just about time but you wonder: isnt it about something more?

Because there is something you meant. And something you are for.

Maybe today you will take wing whitely across the blatant sky, and proudly. Time weights the no-ones: you have waited, and will be known.