Artist Statement
Having an inquisitive nature, in particular around questions of how we define things like “beauty”, and “truth”, and not being content with our society’s accepted definitions of such, I have always felt compelled to seek my own answers. Exploration through the creative process, for me, feels like the most veracious and honest method of doing so.
The creative process, for me, is highly intuitive and improvisational, and thus is not wholly an intellectual act. It involves my unconscious, and instinctual self as much as it does reasoning skills. Walking the line between these two states of consciousness is where I feel the most lucid, the most open and free of any pre-determined goal or outcome. Of course, I rely upon my knowledge of color, line, space, and form, but only insomuch as they are the tools I use to create in a technically unhindered fashion. With the technical concerns transcended, losing "myself" in the process becomes possible, and even my motivation, as opposed to adherence to a specific, preconceived idea. Ideally, this process takes me to a place where I have never been before, where the shifting between what I know (technical abilities), and the unknown (pushing my aesthetic boundaries), reaches a dynamic equilibrium. At that place, there is a sense of validation that my process is honest and I haven't simply repeated what I have done in the past, but I have also left room for openings to further study, in future artworks. Only when I acquire this dynamic tension, and delicate balance, can I truly say a work of art needs nothing else (as some might say, “finished”).
The artworks I create are really by-products of this creative search, in a sense, and not necessarily ends in themselves. If I have the intention, beforehand, to create a “beautiful” painting, for example, I will have already veered off track from where I believe true beauty comes from…that mysterious intuitive place that cannot be tied down with definition. Ultimately, for me, the realization that there are no concrete, universal answers to these questions about beauty and truth etc, is exactly the answer I come up with, and thus it is through this process of exploration that the questions themselves become the answers I seek.