Art in general isn’t nearly as fun or powerful in this age. You could say there’s a positive side to all the access we have to art, as well as the exposure, as artists, we can get outside of the traditional structures. But I wonder if it’s worth what we gave up. Too much art exposure can bore a person. You can also become impervious to the effects that art can have on us.
For a very long time I thought art was all about esthetics, beauty, grace. I did not look at other dimensions, such as distortions, unbalance, pain, darkness. Now I try to reach both, very much like in nature, there is life and death.
The most important quality in an artist is need. A need to draw, a need to paint, a need to observe and obsess.
While a good abstract painting is an event on the canvas, I strive in my figurative work to do the same.
People will always need something created by the hand of an individual, which no one else can do and which offers a unique experience when one is actually in front of it. So a work of art becomes more special, more necessary as so much else is turned into a few gigabytes flashing across a screen.
For about a week I was hospitalized due to overwork, the whole time laying in bed, thinking about my next piece.
I want to make my work and feel connected to, at least, some people, sometimes. The process is the point.
Q: What do you do when you are feeling uninspired? A: Uninspired? Do something I think is awful and not give a shit.
I used to devote days on end to a Velázquez, Houdon, Vermeer, or Corot. I couldn’t say which I looked at the most. Yet for the last twenty years, I find myself more captivated by the natural world as well as by the built environment.
In this time of “great pause,” I am seeing a flourishing of creativity. People are responding to the pandemic in innovative ways. I am suddenly seeing all kinds of new models for cultural production.