Artist Statement
“There are only four questions of value in life. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for? And what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same: only love.” - Don Juan de Marco
When I reflect on what I find to be attractive and beautiful I conjure images that embody graceful movements, nurturing touches or enraptured gazes. All of these characterize ‘the sacred’ which I find in my subjects whether groups of friends, familiars, athletes, even myself. In most cases, I am looking to discover and portray what I call the ‘news behind the news’ in these apparently quotidian images. Though at one level they may represent a frozen instant in time my intention is to free them from time by making explicit what I find to be the eternal within the ephemeral.
The activity of painting such instances serves as an access to that spiritual space: out of time, free of doubt, non-judging, misjudged. Thus entranced and identified with my subject(s) I understand more deeply, I come to know individuals I have never met, revisit relatives now dead, re-experience activities in which I can no longer participate, even slow otherwise turbulent chaos to recognize the face of beauty. This is the unwitting gift of my subjects to me. When my paintings are successful the attentive viewer may become aware of the rapturous or the splendid in the commonplace.
Ultimately, what I discover in ‘the news behind the news’ is love, connection, freedom, joy. These are identical phenomena when I am in the bliss of painting. So it is that I pray, not as an act of petition, atonement, or confession; but rather of thanksgiving and worship. I paint because it is the one sure path to my own thriving. At best I hope that the product of my work will offer similar nourishment to the observer.
“Sadly, I must report that the last patient I ever treated, the great lover Don Juan DeMarco, suffered from a romanticism which was completely incurable, and even worse, highly contagious.” From Don Juan de Marco
∞ It is always humbling to attempt to write a compelling Artist’s Statement and I am aware of the awkwardness of the language I have used. However, my intention is to paint the ineffable so if my work is at all successful, any description of it will necessarily be inadequate. Astute readers will recognize the distinct irony that requires a visual artist to use language as a sine qua non for any presentation of his (or her) work. It takes but a momentary musing to imagine the cultural paucity we might have suffered had Shakespeare or Goethe been required to proffer a ‘Dramatist’s Drawing’ to have ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Faust’ made available to the public.
