Artist Statement
Is it beautiful? Is it strange and unconventional or a clever double entendre? Does it speak to societal ills or mores? Is it a statement of the many human conditions? Does it inspire with its skill for reproduction or perhaps it is a well intentioned trick or shock that delights the collecting public?
To be true to my personal definition of an artist, I mostly cannot create with intent. It is an act more of the unconscious than the conscious from the start. I see art as a riddle about life, the state created in our own minds. Since it is my belief that our view of existence is our own creation, my art constructs unconventional scenes using line, color and subject that take the viewer to a moment with which they possibly are not familiar, just as I believe we are not totally familiar with our own true selves.
My influences range from the great European Expressionists of the early twentieth century, to Dada and the work of Kurt Schwitters or Joseph Bueys, on through the inspirational Abstract Expressionists of the 50’s and 60’s. All these artists have, to my perceptions, ties beyond the everyday visual in that they searched for a form of creation beyond a mode, beyond the mind. They were looking for the primitive force that puts us at our beginning and that is also my point of interest in art.
It is also a desire of mine to stimulate constructive debate by initiating a dialogue about my work; a conversation concerning different forms of expression that expose art as creations that do not just remind human beings of the beauties in nature or social concerns. Art is also capable of releasing us; releasing us from our ingrained thought patterns about what it should be and within that, perhaps what life is supposed to entail. It allows for a peeling away of layers of conditioning, which hopefully opens us and frees us.