Artist's Statement
My work follows in the figurative tradition; it follows in mans search for meaning and identity. Painting is the primal impulse to mark. It’s a visual record of the mind, the body, and the human spirit. For me there’s an urgency to both create and destroy. Maybe it’s out of sheer frustration that I work. Maybe it’s just to satisfy a need to violate or to contradict. I’m not sure. There is a strong feeling though and I feel compelled to communicate this feeling.
Concerning content and meaning in my art, I’m never quite sure. The work seems to be layered with different meanings. It primarily deals with vulnerability, fragility, and submission. It conjures up past images and emotions... feelings about the church, about nuns, relationships with my mother, with my wife, and other persons both male and female that all seem to play a part of each painting. And then there’s the surface, the physical quality of the work that eludes to decay, to violation, and to vulnerability. The surfaces of the paintings are like excavations, surfaces layered with a variety of materials... dry pigments, acrylics, tar, fabrics, oils, bonding agents, along with different clays dug from the Georgia soil. From these materials figurative images are unearthed. Their surfaces reveal the painting's history, its process, and provide actual depth, both physically through build up and layering as well as emotional depth with destructive scarring. The works are an existential search for an abstract presence, an intuitive search into the unknown, a search for truth revealed through distortion and through exaggeration. I feel connected to the past, to a timeless tradition in art that has always been a primary concern of man...the expression of existence. It’s innate. It’s primal. It’s been there since the beginning and I too have become part of this search for meaning and identity through the creative process of art making.
Personal Teaching Philosophy
There are no absolutes in art. Art is something that cannot be measured. It’s something that’s relative, subjective, and even cultural. For me education is all about empowerment…empowering the students to think, to be self-reliant, to be independent, and to be responsible for their own education. As a teacher my most important responsibility is that of a “role model” and because of this, I work in the studio with my students. I feel that’s it’s important for the students to see the work ethic that is required. It’s also important for them to see that creating art requires courage, commitment, revisions, failure, and even frustration which inevitability or occasionally may lead to an opening for resolution. Any professional accomplishment that I achieve in the studio only serves to validate my instruction in the classroom. As Robert Henri, the Ashcan School painter and great American teacher, said, “Don't take me as an authority. I am simply expressing a very personal point of view. Nothing final about it. You have to settle these matters for yourself.” Basically, what I’m saying is that education requires a strong work ethic. Education is there if you are willing to work for it. Grading in art is impossible, it’s even superficial, but it is a requirement in our educational system so we have to deal with it. Remember, what you put into a class is what you get out of a class – that is real education.