Opening remarks from my artist talk on 2/17
I want to thank everyone who braved the weather to come out and listen to me talk a little bit about my process, what inspires me, and my recent body of work. The following are opening remarks I made at my artist talk on 2/17 at the Compound Gallery:
Before we start, I’d like to thank all you for coming today and I’d like to begin by reading a quote from Jim Lewis’s book, Ghosts of New York.
“There was such a mystery to violence, arising suddenly and then retreating again, leaving nothing behind but something broken, and no way of knowing how it happened, no one to ask.”
Alright, let’s get some details out of the way, this exhibition features a group of paintings that I made in my studio in Half Moon Bay, CA in 2023. These paintings are characterized by abstract imagery with dynamic and expressive gestural brushwork balancing between the chaotic and controlled and feature a wide range of color palettes.
I paint abstract paintings because abstract painting creates space for me to combine the things that I am interested in or inspired by in a given moment. This type of freedom isn’t as accessible when painting figures, portraits, still life or just employing a more representational style. In my opinion those styles tend to focus the viewer more on the technique of the artist or the accuracy of the representation. I also choose to paint over photography, digital art, or any machine facilitated work because I like to see the human happenstance in a painting. I like paintings that look like they were a struggle. For me, every painting has felt like a mountain that I had to climb - sometimes I come across familiar footholds but each one has left me a combination of exhausted, grateful, improved, callused, and relieved.
As a process-oriented abstract painter, I follow a series of steps to produce each painting. The paintings you see today represent a year’s worth of tinkering on those steps. From variations on color, brushstrokes, brush types, compositions, layering, masking, all the way down to variations on preparing the canvas. I must have tried 20 different ways to prepare the canvas in order to get the type of brush strokes I was envisioning. Each of these paintings are derived from a similar vocabulary of marks, a common set of lines and shapes that make up the visual language of this show.
People often ask, what do you paint? Or sometimes what do these paintings mean? And in general I refrain from trying to explain what is going on in them too much - each painting isn’t meant to be a story, if anything you can read them like a map, or a diagram in a science textbook, or as a doctor would inspect an x-ray. I like to make space so that the viewer can search in them for details, like a marker, a fracture, or a star on the wrapper of a tootsie roll tootsie pop. When I was a child I was told that if your tootsie roll wrapper had a star on it, that you could get a free tootsie pop. I personally never tried to collect on this offer - does anyone know if it is actually true?
At a high level, all of these paintings embrace a systematic exploration of chaos and control with a little bit of humor. I was trying to create images that are simultaneously unnerving yet approachable, explosions frozen in time, dangerous yet disarmed like tamed circus tigers.
I debated how much I want to reveal here. I like to think of a painting like a magic trick. Knowing how the magician performed the trick robs the viewer of the magic. And to be honest, I’m an intuitive painter, so I always start a painting with an intention - but 9 times out of 10 I am surprised where I end up. I’ll look at the finished piece and wonder how I actually did it. I like to maintain a balance between the mystery and anchoring the paintings so that for the viewer there is a sense of discovering something new and at the same time - you are anchored by relatable elements.
So I’ll list out some of the anchoring elements that came together to make up the work in this show.
Cartography
Diagrams
Cartoon explosions
Or clouds of violence when 2 cartoon characters get into a fight
And more specifically Fliescher cartoons like Popeye and Betty Boop
Spy Vs. Spy comics
The Family circus comics where Billy goes wandering around the town
Pinball and Pachinko machines
Board games
Volcanoes
IThe movie and manga, Akira
Mathematical notations
Proofreaders marks
Calligraphy
Sacred geometry
And Fireworks in the night sky
There is more in the paintings, but this list should give you a good starting point to find some of the anchors. I’d love to know if you saw any of them or felt them when viewing the work.
I’d like to end by reciting a poem by Jen Fabish, this poem was inspired by the painting Ever More Extravagant Disasters Resulting in an Unloosening of Fate: Number 38
Into the vortex. Believe
we have control, belief
as strong as the cosmic particles that made us,
as old as the time we’ve invented.
When was the first piercing that lanced a heart, made it clutch into a fist? Where landed the first blow?
Fist to fist, fist
to glass shattering
and in the shards proof of control.
Destruction irrefutable evidence of cause and effect
a repudiation of glass
with its daring fragility striking at the bone of all things filling the very air we breathe with shards, impossible to walk, impossible
to stand still without the cut blue veins bleeding red blood cells and fragments
defying the grid
filing time and space
pulled toward one fatal point
that is both the end and a beginning.
Thank you.