Self Portrait
Acrylic Paint
When
creating a painting, I use a combination of minimal, expressive, and
realistic techniques to craft pieces that create excitement, while
simultaneously tell a story. Some topics I grace are comical, while
others are more serious and dark.
Through the use of scale and
shape, I can use minimal rendering to produce a high contrast between
dark and light, thus making a photo-realistic painting, only painting
in the darkest areas. I try to bring in this style, with a painterly
style of both realistic (portraits) and expressionistic (landscapes).
All elements come together to form a new world, a world that explores
what is real and what is just finished with your eye and the viewers’
imagination. In every painting I try to create a sense of fantastical
encounters and unhinged events by using imaginary situations and
realistic characters. I investigate a new style of painting often. I
maintain curiosities involving my own capabilities with paint, this
mindset provides each one of my paintings with a distinctive style,
that is at sometimes graphic and painterly. Inevitably I hope to unify
these two elements of my painting style.
I started my graphic
painting style with using just black and white. Using high contrast in
these paintings progressed to incorporating such contrast with my
instinctive painterly style. When I am painting, I have to become two
painters; one who wants flat, highly contrasted black and white
imagery, and the other who is interested in bright colorful images that
can be made with the brush strokes. Each one is painted differently,
the black and white is a very slow process of great detail and
precision, and the more painterly technique is faster and more about
movement and mark, than precision. I also attempt investigate the
gloriousness of life and how everything around us is artistically
crafted and seamlessly engaging in every way to everyone and the world
around us.
I paint because I enjoy it, because if I didn’t paint I
would not be able to fully engage the world around me and be able to
create a sense of understanding for the relationships that all living
and non-living things have with one another. My art reflects my feelings
about everything I hold inside myself until I paint it, whether it is
to laugh a little more, or to cry a little more, it doesn’t really
matter because I am just trying to evoke great feeling. I work to
enhance the world one still, visual moment at a time. In each painting,
whether I plan it out or just paint with no plan in mind, comes to
life, and grasps the viewers’ attention. I hope to achieve this
intensely and for as long as possible. I make my decisions as an artist
based on my own experiences and feelings, rather than previously used
techniques derived from any one artist. I find inspiration not from
the work created by other artists, but from the subjects I choose to
paint, and how I would like to see them.
