A Sort of Artist's Statement

This is a sort of artist's statement, but far more boring and long-winded. My current form of blogging is to limit the text to as little as possible. I am lazy when it comes to writing and the blog tends to trickle off when I feel the pressure of having to add words to the pictures. I hung my exhibition yesterday, so today I will ramble a little about the reasoning behind it (and to help me get over the guilt for hardly writing anything in the last couple of months). Please feel free to skip the words and look at the pictures!

 

For a long time after moving to America, I found it difficult to process who I had become and the new meaning of home. I was English, yet found the American "English" language a challenge. This culture that in many ways was similar to my own, is in other ways completely opposite and confusing. I still often experience a shock by a sudden feeling of otherness and a perhaps a reminiscence for the past, yet I relish the possibility of new pastures and freedom to travel. It was these thoughts that triggered the exploration for my exhibition "Juxtaposition".

I am making a visual journey through the unconscious, unveiling fragments of images, dreams and thoughts that subliminally affect our daily lives. The images are changed in form, appearance, nature or function and allied with something seemingly unrelated to become unusual or strange, creating metaphors of human cognitive and emotional thought processes. That sounds pretentious, but it sorta fits.

 

I had a skiing accident a few years ago, where I broke a few non-essentials and started the back disc issues that I have now (I made the mistake of thinking I was a better skier than I actually was). I also bumped my head, which has since caused me to have some memory issues and a certain level of thought fragmentation. I have days where my sentences are all backwards and words become misplaced. I have toyed with expressing this in my compositions and have had fun with titling some of the work based on this. Since the start of the year, I have blogged many such pictures as I further explore this work that I originally started around 9 months ago.

 

I use a medium called Tradigital Art, a medium that combines both traditional art and computer-based techniques to implicate an image. The images seen here in the blog and at the exhibition are derived from my oil paintings or photographs. I manipulate to generate a new original that I could not have been able to create with painting strokes alone, but bypassing the canned look of straight photoshop image. As a traditionally trained fine art printmaker, I love the fact that there is a hybrid option that can give me a look unobtainable elsewhere and that also satisfies my thirst for printmaking.

 

I am forever battling to get the visual balance between abstract and realism, consciousness and sub-consciousness, time reality and relativity. I never managed to settle for one or the other as I often get distracted by some texture or colour combination I have made in the corner of a painting and end up replicating that small section as an abstract. Stylistically, I am currently inspired by Surrealists painter Salvador Dali and Dada artist; Kurt Schwitters. I was lucky enough to visit the "Merz Barn" Exhibit in London a couple of years ago and this spun me off on a certain visual direction. I meld aspects of thought from these icons with that of my own, putting trust my own hand and eye. 

 

As I work, I try to quiet the internal voices; the ones that demand reason, and the ones that demand chaos (and less effectively, the ones that demand chocolate). I add and subtract until the work makes sense to me and offers me a genuine surprise. But, as much as I want visual harmony and a narrative for myself, I also want to offer a puzzle for the person viewing. I am hoping that there will be some work in this exhibition that will cause a person to stop for a minute to figure out just what the relationships mean to them.