The Artist’s Statement(s)

Like most artist’s I have the urge to rewrite my artist’s statement daily. Or at least every time I start or finish a painting. Not radical changes , but tweeks. While I am working on a painting it often occurs to me that I have not emphasized the thing I am emphasizing in the painting enough in my most recent artist’s statement. More medievalism, more language, less architecture? The reverse? I go back and forth, ping ponging off the varied and various things that inform my artmaking. Tiresome but also invigorating and exciting!

What I need is not an artist’s statement so much as a series of artist’s statements. A bullet journal of my regular permutations recorded as one-sentence artist statements. But to start I am going to show you my first serious attempt at capturing my artwork in the inadequate netting of language. I wrote this in early 2022:

“I combine my photographs with redacted text, found images, colors and textures to create scenes that combine the concrete with abstraction. Photos of buildings, street signs, billboards, fences, sidewalks, trees and incompleteness feature in my work. Alongside them are my personal vernacular of images and texts from “outdated” elementary school textbooks, religious texts, paused television screenshots, constitutional law commentaries, flags, stencils, puzzle pieces, magazines, self-help books, art gallery adverts, back issues of art magazines, board game instructions and literary “masterpieces”. Also, my intentional misinterpretation of numerous post-structuralist ideas leads me to include elements of European medieval architecture and illuminated manuscripts in my paintings.”

It is an accurate description of my work. Just not as accurate as it used to be.