I scrutinized myself as I sought normalcy. I lost control and through the art-making process I developed vast scale shifts from single cells to diverse biological landscapes. Klee states that subject matter sucks and content is king. It took several years to understand that the content of my work should be more than an abstraction of cells as characters under my manipulation. The imagery use to reveal an atmosphere created by the subject as having a defining role. To subvert this, I now impose landscape and render objects over those shapes.
I was attracted to the microscopic because personal experiences led me to the understanding that it’s the most undetectable, which often causes the greatest problems. Through art I began exploring medicine, beginning with fundamental biology of the human body. Before long my focus became not the biology itself, but how I could manipulate, distort, disfigure and ultimately birth microorganisms through creation theories as a means of control. The process began with manipulating cells and nuclei and resulted in my own fictional structures. After having created the figures and illustrations, I began to interpret their framework, involving an atmosphere, a cryptographic alphabet and ultimately their personalities.
The characters having been born though art, eventually diminished. The art became more about where they lived, their atmosphere and their landscape, than about themselves. Various fabrics, selected for their pattern, are adopted as the new departure points. Voids are interpreted in the repetition, allowing the color contained within matter to escape and invade the atmosphere. The freedom of line bore geometric forms and defined its theoretical role in my future work.
Identifying locations within the landscapes created, I set up opportunities for dialog to unfold. As the moderator of these ideas, I witness the debates which visually form questions instead of conclusions. I reexamined these questions through the art-making process. I am now extracting the properties of anatomical materials and introducing them to the effects of pattern and color. By doing this, objects find paths and create dwellings within the piece, opening doors for dialog between themselves. Reacting to one another these elements create spaces where line defines both the containment and flow of color, revealing voids that harbor diverse patterns within the greater landscape.
I lose control as each piece begins and ends. The dialogue of every line, void and shape show that the subject desires conversation. In imposing the forum for this debate, I set the rules or subject for the conversation, but allow the flow of ideas. While my art in the painted form has brought me to a certain level, it is now necessary for a holistic approach in which discourse is established through an understanding of writing, discussion and painting. The control in my paintings is less and less the more I understand. |
