when you hold them in your hands.
It’s hard to be a hero
when you trip over your Helmut Langs.
It’s hard to be a rock star
when you’re not in a band.
It’s hard to be the avenger
when you see only mirrors on the other end.
The arc of my work has been an odyssey through a variety of subjects and painting genres, abstract and representational, which have circled, overlapped and fed back into one another. Throughout my life as an artist, I have revisited and repurposed aspects of my earlier work, investing them with different meanings in different contexts. My path has been guided by the freedom as well as the imperative to do what feels appropriate and interesting to me at any given time. I have worked sequentially in different styles while viewing each new move as part of a larger, more complex narrative. I understand that art styles represent world views, but I also believe that ideas, life experiences and sensibilities are not bound to any one style. My goal as an artist has been to create an inclusive and original visual language that synthesizes my art interests as well as my understanding of how I exist in the world.
My paintings of the past year are an inversion of the paintings of bucking rodeo bulls I began making in 2009, which themselves went through multiple stages of metamorphosis, both conceptually and physically. Whatever changes I went through with these earlier paintings, they still maintained some level of representation of bulls. Although some of the dynamics of the bull paintings are still present in those I am currently making, the bulls are not. Instead, these paintings bring the viewer into the core of a body, whether human or beast, in all of its complexity, power and vulnerability. While I had made forays into this content for a few years before, the real rupture from the earlier bull paintings came when I started exploding the mass of the bull until it became a collection of organic forms that struggled to integrate or to remain separate, to expand or be squeezed by surrounding shapes. The squeezed shapes seemed to look for pathways to escape or invade. One of the challenges has been determining the size and reach of the shapes as they accumulated and extended towards the edges of the painting, as well as how many or how few could inhabit the painting and still provide a coherent organism. It’s a process with different conclusions from painting to painting, which for me alters the meaning of each work.