Artist Statment

Art is a sacrifice of life itself. The artist sacrifices life to art not because he wants to but because he can not do anything else.”
-Louise Bourgeois

This quote by Bourgeois has forever stuck with me since reading it, and I can’t come to any reason to argue with it otherwise. Making art is a part of me and is a larger part of my life. I produce work that steps off of the canvas and takes its place amongst sculpture and photo prints. My work thrives on creating new ways of looking, closer than the every day encounter as well as taking materials out of their traditional contexts and allowing them to exist in new ones.

Oil paint, paint thinner and linseed oil usually take their places on canvass, however I have chosen a different location, my glass palette. This work is called “Oil Interactions” because it’s just that; a conversation with each other, a meeting place between linseed oil and oil paint. These up-close photos are abstract and read as molecular, scientific, organic and bodily, creating an intimate image for the viewer. Taking these traditional materials out of their history and transforming them into another entity is what my work strives for, for a new way of producing while still containing some traditional aspects in the composition. For instance, the use of line and the flat bed picture plane have large roles in bringing the work together; the linseed oil creating a “snake-like” contour line while resting in the front of the surface image.

In this piece the red oil paint background allows the viewer to be attracted to it yet doesn’t quite know what the image is of. The organic image is somewhat centered but also allows the viewers eyes to drift past the frame. The field of color is a bold constant and doesn’t argue for attention. Choosing colors and mixing the paint with your palette knife is in itself a private act, but then to pour this opaque liquid at such a small scale and watch it overlap and layer onto itself acts as a personal performance. After pouring linseed oil on my palette of oil paint, I photograph the interaction and document the result. In this particular piece, the oil paint is an alizarin and cadmium medium red mixture. The form it creates is an organic shape with a “snake-like” detail from where the linseed oil touched the palette. The image is somewhat centered which gives the piece a traditionally composed work. When looking at the image, some people don’t know what to make of it and will try to find representational elements, however they fail at this and walk away with finding it only as something familiar.