Pink Floyd - Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part One)

unfinished

I think that my art is a documentary of my current albeit temporary problems, inspirations, obsessions, proclamations, and anarchy. I think the environments that I create with paint embrace and shun being human, and are certainly privy to the gamut of human foibles. Perhaps for me painting is an escapist activity, allowing me to leave my humanly concerns and tap into an energy that feels more real & relevant; higher.

I don’t want my paintings to be even tangentially referential; I don’t want any concrete objects or ideas or messages displayed. I don’t want to obviate anything. I want the environment inside of my paintings to be as shrouded in ambiguity as possible, I think the idea of “topical ambiguity” is a lot more potent than the idea of “the obvious”, I think ambiguity speaks of potentiality, and I find that 'potential' is an incredible muse. I am trying to embrace and transcend humanity through painting, and though neither of those things will ever be fulfilled, it is the potential of either of them happening that keeps me going. I think it is cheap and fake to say you are going to paint something and then paint that thing. A singular object, a still life, people sitting in a park, whatever. Fuck it at least say you are going to paint from an idea. Eventually, you have not painted that thing; you have painted a painting of that thing. Most objective paintings would be much better off aflame, their emulations are offensive to the real items they emulate. A flower is much more beautiful than any painting could ever be. Flat out. Attempts to capture what the eyes see on canvas are useless, and boring, and redundant. And so limiting. Paint something your eyes aren’t capable of seeing. (Otherwise why paint at all?). And by the way, damn are still life paintings contemporarily and ironically irrelevant...

When I paint any one canvas, I am painting everything in my entire life, every image my eyes have ever witnessed every thought my brain has ever dared to cognate and every gust of wind that has blown through the hair on my knuckles, everything. The physical painting may change from canvas to canvas, but the image you see is merely a contemporary reinterpretation of the same information encompassed in life.

Inside of my paintings, one can see beauty and grace, strength, aggression, passion, contemplation, confidence, but can just as easily find weakness, anger, anarchy, exhaustion, impatience, and disbelief. The canvas is an extension of my physical embodiment, there can be no intellectual separation between the two, I and it, and therefore I refuse to limit my paintings to ‘a pear’ ‘a woman sitting’ etc …as it is neither appropriate nor practical to limit my scope to singular items of negligible importance. I am alive, and I want my paintings to be wholly representative of that. Of course, it has been argued that when a Picasso paints a pear, his painting is really about all of the things I have addressed in this letter, in response to that argument, I prefer to save that sort of speculative postulation, carrion, for the critics to jostle over.