Artist Statement 2005
My current studies: Study of Verbs , and Study of Landscapes , continues where my Study of Warm and Cold, Light and Dark left off. Visual abstraction to me has become more of an issue of what makes an image abstract? I believe that abstraction is an image or concept that does not have current recognition. In my current works, I am trying to move abstraction towards recognition. Most viewers are focused on the “hard line” images that define an object, but let's say that perhaps we look at images with unfocused eyes. The image becomes a blurry object of line, shape, and color, leaving our imagination to fill in the blurry image to the point of recognition.
In my two series: Study of Landscapes , and Study of Verbs , I am working with common assumptions. With Landscapes, I am pushing the images to abstraction. This abstraction is really a defining of the general components of a classical Landscape: Ground, Horizon, Sky, Foreground, and Background. These components can be broken down into color fields very similar to images created by the Fauvists, where surface planes are broken up into color fields. Forming an abstract image based on an already recognized format. This format ended up pushing me towards an “impressionistic” view of landscapes, maybe because in my own mind I needed to create my own recognizable images to feel comfortable with the work as a whole.
The series Study of Verbs I dealt with the abstract not only in visual images, but also in words in and of themselves. The written word in and of itself is abstract, not just because obviously the written word does not appear anything like the concept in which it represents. Take for example the word “DIVIDE,” by itself it has no definition is it a verb or a noun? However, placed in context, we can decipher its meaning. So what if I placed a seemingly simple word in the context of a visual image? In a sense I would be creating a context for both the image and the word. Words are abstraction; however we have understood them to the point of recognition.
