Artists Statement
Painting is how I process the world around me. I was never a good student in school, and painting was the only time I felt truly bright. Years later, I still feel the most connected, the most grounded, the most me, when I have a brush in my hand.
While my early years were most heavily influenced by Picasso, VanGough, and Matisse, it was discovering artists like de Kooning, Rauschenberg, and Basquiat as a teenager that gave me the freedom and the license to really explore what more I had to say as a painter. Their rule-breaking and trend-setting inspired me to push my own work in new and daring directions.
A good painting always begins with an experience or an accumulation of experiences. When my life became focused on farming in my early thirties, I was desperate to reconnect with art, and the stuff of my everyday life was the most obvious resource for subject matter. Working with cattle, bulls became a symbol for the fertility of the entire herd, and so it became in my work. The bulls became increasingly stylized, increasingly remote from the source of inspiration, not an animal observed, but a symbol projected. Dogs, another constant fixture of farm living, became the bull’s nemesis, eventually transforming from domestic animals to wolf-like symbols of predation. My color palettes range from the earthen to the hyper-saturated, and the choices I make in this regard are as intuitive and emotionally charged as my relationships with my subjects.
It is important that my paintings be rich in narrative, even if that narrative is suggested far more than it is described. My horse series began when a friend’s prize stallion impaled itself on a steel post in a freak accident (and miraculously survived). The series became a repository for my memories of this extraordinary and traumatic incident, but it communicates less about what physically happened-which could not be inferred from the work- and more about my own visceral emotional response. The images took on a life of their own, existing as paintings on canvas in a way that they could not exist elsewhere.
Nearly all paintings, even the most abstract, at least imply some sort of figure ground relationship. One of my goals is to move past that, to disassociate subject from experience and animal from farm in favor of something more synthetic. I want my work to embody something deeper, more emotional, more primal than a simple experience, something touching upon an archetypical truth. It is no accident that my work sometimes evokes prehistoric cave paintings, which still ooze with mystery and meaning thousands of years after their creation.
Perhaps as an antidote to the nebulous world of synthetism, I have recently begun working “en plein air,” mostly focusing on the vivid landscapes of the American Southwest. Immersing myself in the environment and exploring direct observational study continues to be a worthwhile exercise. Of course, it is the feeling of the landscape that is far more important than the external reality, so it should come as no surprise that my expressionistic leanings continue to creep in.
How these disparate influences and multiple bodies of work might one day coalesce, I can hardly predict, but I remain confident that whatever subjects I tackle will continue to be vehicles for painting myself above all else.
