Artist Statement
In the series, Adaptation: Conscious Control of the Subconscious Aesthetic, my intent was to record my subconscious reactions to literary stimuli on canvases that I painted to resemble aged exterior walls. To fully realize the project, I need to express two stories simultaneously.
The first story is a representational embodiment about the inevitable and unforgiving nature of time’s march forward. To demonstrate the physical degradation of time, I designed and built canvases as large as six feet wide by five feet tall, using a gesso-sand mortar mix and tinted by acrylic paint, which created textures similar to concrete walls. At first glance, the wall surfaces are dingy and scarred by palette knife cuts and scrapes. However, these walls have a history that occasionally peeks through. Below the surfaces are layers, upon layers of paint. Each layer contains the psychological bliss and torments stories previously told; bantered around ideas, and even violent gestures of frustration and angst.
Located atop these walls is a story of abstraction. Line, pattern, and color scrawls across the canvas, giving form to impressions garnered from an enigmatic text. That text, The Golem, by Gustav Meyrink was set in Prague of the early 1900’s and served as a launching point for my exploration on how events, even fictitious ones, might inspire abstract interpretations in the artist’s psyche. Individual chapter narratives are reduced to a series of impressions; which, in turn, become ever-more distilled into concentrated abstractions of lines and colorific pattern expressions in oil on canvas.
Oil paints, unlike other media, have both a directness and a transcendence when handled and manipulated properly. With a combination of luminescence or flatness; bold strokes or splatters and drips; sculpted effects of thick, clumpy paint or washes of transparent of layers; the artist portrays an object, an idea, a gesture, or the effect of time.
Adaptation was designed as an investigation into both my process and my philosophy of art. In the end, the process yielded a series of paintings that reflect my responses to a literary theme. Philosophically, I concluded that my intent, when paired with my expression, defines my art is the conscious control of the subconscious aesthetic.