My granite from which to widdle a sentence

a one or two-page artist’s statement illuminating your artistic practice by discussion of such questions as sources of influence, character of the inquiry, and some suggestion of future directions you wish to explore.

Ok, so let’s talk.  And by that I’m going to talk excessively and in no order because otherwise none of this will get written.  My task before you today is to reply to the request of the quote above.  Well this is hard.  Upon leaving Undergrad I had written an artists statement that ended in relating myself to an alcoholic priest who has locked himself inside his confessional, determining to drink himself to death.  In short, I had become somewhat jaded with the hyper articulation that takes place within the academy, overwhelmed by the inaccessibility of what had at this point become my art and the art of my role models, and ready to declare myself a self aware contradiction.  After staring into the gridlocked argument between my belief of art as accessible instigatory objects for communication among peoples and my actions as an academic practical joker, I had decided to continue making opaque art that criticized it’s own opacity.  After graduation I continued to make work in this vein, but also matriculated through other more pragmatic visions.  Political Work.  Public Art.  Illustration.  In those I found less and less of an argument.  They made sense from idea to process and action, which is something my academic work rarely did outside of our little community.  My grandmother respects why Michael Phelps should swim from Chinese fish, but simply isn’t a fan of Bruce Nauman.  And yet this ran out of steam.  I found myself returning to the works of those art sweet hearts of the academy, and not famed illustrators to inspire me.  And that’s when I decided I had to change what had been a fundamental belief (and I believe and fundamental flaw) in me ever since I first picked up a brush in high school.  Art is not for communication.  Art is for the present.  Artmaking, is soley for me.  Now it’s as dirty as turpentine coming out, even reading it myself, but hear me out.  I believe art making is infinitely more edifying for the progenitor than the reader.  The beloved side effect of course are these objects that have the residue of work left about them, be it a protestant and thick work residue like de kooning, or a clean, intellectualized and notarized work residue like Koons.  Art can inspire communication, but only if the artist is gratuitously engulfing him or herself in the conscription of creation.   Manzoni was pure flame, and his work was pure residue, nothing else. Art is a mental exercise for the present.  There is no great culmination in the future, no grand goal or finish line for me to cross.  I make art because it makes me present of my presence.  I prefer academic work because I’ve found through trial and error that it makes me feel the most awake, and art is best done when most awake.

Let’s Square up and get serious.

SOURCES OF INFLUENCE

I am utterly and inconceivably influenced by my medium, which more often than not, is factory mixed oil paint on stretched and gessoed canvas.  The more pertinent discussion might be why I choose this medium in the first place.  I do so for it’s inherently platonic capabilities.  Painting is an anachronism.  To do so now is only to relive theories, figures, and images from it’s illustrious past.  I don’t want to trivialize it: painting is a dead art form.  There are arguments within academy, but it’s only because academics have a deranged idea of how often paintings are actually seen by people outside of the academy.  To speak through the mouth of a dead man is as platonic as it gets, and as stated earlier, I’ve made amends with this notion that my art objects will not lead to practicality.  To use paint places my feet into an ocean of metaphysical, self-referential object critique.  I am influenced by my existence.  My existence is framed by what I am; a mortal American human being of the 21^st century.  My paintings exist and work as avatars of my existential adventure, framed by not only my existence, but by it’s own.  This includes paintings historical luggage.  I choose paint because of its nefariously well-documented duel enrollments in existence.

Note: talk about cross cultural stuff.  Gwd.

CHARACTER OF THE INQUIRY

My work is a constant proclamation of myself onto the subject matter.  I stare into the void.  It stares back.  I stare at the painting.  A retarded paint baby screams at me.  My work is about the perpetual lens of interpretation due to having a self.  I flaccidly attempt to remove the self in sardonic overreaching imagery.  I create images that work as conscious versions of Hegel’s mansions; a house for god that itself is an atheist.  In my work I slip a stitch like a Navajo, or give a sentence too much like an insidious narrator from a poem by Robert Browning.  The character of my works inquiry draws upon my sources of influence; my existence and that of paintings.  Both are imperfect representations of their wholes, alike with art’s transcendental goal of communication.

THE FUTURE

YOU.