What Is The Story?

 There is something I have been struggling with for years, why must an artist, to be taken “seriously”, produce a recognizable body of work? Recognizable in the manner when people see your art in a gallery, in print, on social media, they immediately attribute it to you.

Gallerists, other artists, and colleagues advise consistency as a way to brand you as the artist. 

When I look at the body of work I have made over the past fourteen years, at the beginning, I was all over the place. A result of taking a lot of workshops and copying the style of the instructor. Quite normal, I am told.

Once I realized I had to go beyond the instructors and their techniques to develop my own style (and frankly, I don’t want my work to look like another artists), I still found that I took pleasure in the experimentation phase of painting. What if is a part of my internal dialogue. Over the past few years, I have been working in a more disciplined manner, and can see a consistency of my hand on the canvas.

Then in the late fall of 2018 I re-discovered my love of collage and began developing a series that has no resemblance to my paintings or mixed media work.

 

The Black-Tie Affair

Analog Collage

22.5 x 14 inches

 While musing on this one early morning, it struck me; I am a writer as well as a painter. My collages are an extension of my writing, a form of visual storytelling told in paper images instead of words.

 What lights me up about collage is the ability to create fantasies, dual realities, puzzles for the mind.  

 What is the story of The Black-Tie Affair? Is it about loss? Mystery? Regret? Or simply a man’s remembrance of an exquisite moment in his life?

I am not here to tell you the ending. I am here to show you the beginning. The rest is up to you.

 

My Awareness is a Silhouette Floating in the Background

acrylic painting on Birch board

12 x 12 inches

My painting are also a form of visual storytelling told with pigment and paint. Here I strive to create worlds of calm, beauty and elegance. An oasis for the mind where you can lose yourself for a while, tuck the troubles of the world away and just dream.

My purpose as a non-objective painter is to create a visual landscape from the inside-out. The painting is my story and your story simultaneously. My version, your version, the true version.

 The End