ARTIST STATEMENT

 I’ve learned it’s best to describe myself as interdisciplinary and I know it’s largely because of having ADHD. My mediums as an artist range from oils, sculpture, to performance and my work is as nonlinear as a super-bouncy ball thrown violently in a long, narrow hallway.  How I make a piece depends on what topic I am trying to tackle and how abstract my idea is. Painting is my optics, sculpture and performance is the pile of used steel wool that is my brain. 

I am a wannabe historian in the guise of a painter. I use painting as a means to capture the figure (mainly) in conjunction with history, both personal and global. However, hyper photorealism or high naturalism isn’t my goal during the process. Giacometti once said, “reality was poles apart from the supposed objectivity of a film”  after having an experience in Paris, realizing his vision of the world had been photographic. I seek to convey a similar fragmented and chaotic reality not only because that's how I perceive things and recall them from memory, but also because that is how history has been and still is recorded.  The whole story is never told as is for it is written by the oppressors, conquerors, and charlatans.  If you want the true story beyond what is just given, you must seek it out or piece it together.  I accomplish this in my paintings through a combination of open brush work and purposeful unresolved areas to create the fragmentation I seek.   

Sculpture and performance are a contrasting extension of myself.  As a sculptor, I feel I am an aspiring activist and poet. Drawing upon my experiences in the military, with teenage trauma, and growing up in the religious American heartland of Youngstown, Ohio, I use sculpture as a means to convey the abstract ideas I cannot capture accurately on canvas.  Building materials such as concrete, wood, and steel are my materials of choice partially because of their connection to my midwest blue-collar style upbringing. They are the materials of the worker or proletariat. But more importantly, they are materials that are extremely human in manifestation.  For example, steel to me is a representation of self-improvement and the human will to persevere.  It can be beaten but reformed through superheating, corroded but restored through sandblasting.

I’ve noticed the correlation between my sculptures and paintings is my fascination with line and texture. The line to me is the atom of the visual and it’s amazing what one can simply do when a line is pushed. I like to turn my line into a molecule by adding texture.  The molecule that is texture and line is of utmost importance. To me, there is more presence in an expressive mark because it captures not just emotion but history and insight.  History, poetry, and activism are made by how one makes their own expressive mark.