Becoming an artist was never a deliberate decision. It just crept up on me slowly and is still skulking around the corners of my life.
I narrowed down the options by choosing the path I felt right. I can’t recall the paths that I didn’t choose.
To me traditional art materials are burdensome: they point to themselves, or other points in history. I like to use a material that tells a different story and has a different history, often outside of art.
Social media turns works of art into objects of rapid consumption, sometimes supersonic, which I think makes us dangerously insensitive to the enormous amount of work, time, and sacrifice that lies behind each post, each evanescent image.
I like to make art that I do not understand. It shows, unrelentingly, that other worlds are possible.
In art, I find joy but no peace.
Why does all official portraiture always have to be celebratory—if you consider it as a visual catalog of past officials? Why can’t it also be a critical depiction or interpretation?
Can art change the world? Can it start a revolution, or stop one? If it can’t change the world, can it change an individual?
A lot of my work arises out of an accident, or stumbling on some event that spurs me to want to record it.
Anybody who has drawn or painted for any length of time realizes that the intensity of creative work cannot be maintained at a consistent level. There are times when I am overwhelmed with visual ideas and wish I had another pair of hands to set down my perceptions. At other times everything seems dormant, though I realize that this is part of the ebb and flow of life.