ARTIST PHILOSOPHY : STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

When in the first grade, I was reprimanded for drawing dinosaurs and monsters eating the words on my spelling tests. Years later, I find that I am still creating monsters and other amalgams, but my content, direction, and reason for making images has changed. I have always been interested in the unordinary, the fantastic, the surreal, the supernatural, the unexpected, and the spiritual.

These qualities in life, or experiences, help me gain insight into the ordinary, the natural, and the not so fantastic in our everyday lives. My images focus, like a fictitious novel or a parable, on personifying intangible experience to make it tangible. My imagination and creativity have always been great vehicles for me to express the things I encounter which are hard to verbalize or put into writing. I am drawn to the ability of mythology and the fantastic to communicate larger, grander ideas to a community. I feel in our post-industrial society we have lost a sense of our collective stories and the magical; we are in need shamans to tell us a story or paint us an image of what happens behind the scenes of life and invigorate us with wonder.

Conceptually, my images since gradute school have maintained a theme, the classification of these creatures into a self-generated mythology of the Angst Machina. They are the divergent side of homo sapiens separated from the natural world by fear, mirror selves of a humanity that has been ruled by their fears for 10,000 years. (refer to schema for their associative qualities/families).

I have been moving away from strictly first person expression where both the act of making the image and its content are self-oriented. Instead, I have become concerned about documenting my own personal emotions and experiences in a way that addresses a broader spectrum of experiences. My ideas are becoming concerned with the political, the social, and the spiritual aspects of our culture.

They are less concerned with what I feel in an introspective manner and are more about an observer who is relaying their concerns as visual commentary. It is in the same fashion that a political cartoon will address a topic and still retain the mark and identity of the artist. Also, images have functioned for me as allegorical schematics.

The subject matter has moved to center stage with supporting elements that give a sense of decipherable meaning and environment. The completed work is then labeled in the work itself and catalogued as a separate and unique expression of experience. Images then become parts of a sort of macrocosm, a family of interrelated beings, a chart of experiences.

Given names as titles like Xenophobe, or Matriarch/Patriarch, Phoenix, or Consumption; they become a portrayal of that singular idea and engendered emotion/concept within a family of ideas.

Printmaking has become my favored medium due to the results of the process that aid the realization of the work. Old maps or aged documents can be eluded to indirectly as well as overlaying matrixes of information to aid the concept of them as schematics. Digital processes have only added to the possibilities in this regard because of the ease at which the subparts can be manipulated. Layers of visual information in a computer program conceptually are very similar to layers of printed information by plate, stone, screen, or woodblock from a logistical standpoint.