My paintings are wild battles of line and color, violent and raw, like machetes chopping paths through a dangerous jungle. Surreal characters emerge from from the complex textures of overlapping line and color. The organic and fluid lines create the edges of faces and bodies. The edge of the canvas is actually the center of the work, and the A semetrical compositions mirror to reveal their true image.
My process is chaotic and raw, I feel free and lost in play. As I apply paint on canvas, I forget all my artistic training and become a force of creation, organizing with movement and gravity, color and chaos like striking lightening. Observation at every phase of pieces creation is essential, I remain somewhat disembodied and have spent years learning when to stop the process of motion and release my imagination into it.
The organic lines flow and twist smoothly into several definable shapes of various size. The creatures looking back demand to be buried in complexity illuminated by the dexterity of the viewers eye. I look through them, around them, and into them, seeking relationships between them as the story of the work unfolds. The viewer finds that they are built up from smaller images, layer upon layer like subatomic atoms drawn together to create a single body, memory or action.
The formula for their existance is simple. I am an explorer of the imagination, of the world, of endless visions before me. I feel like a vessle for the art gods rarely having a plan when I begin my play. No one plans spontaneous play, and the of results of such fun often shock me in the quiet moments of obseration after they have been born to the tangible world. My art works are my creatures, my friends, angles or demons without judgment- if I stare deeply into the choas of raw form.
I never grew out of playing with little creatures and figures, building worlds for them.
I wasnt really given a choice about my art making life, from the time I was a small boy my extreem allergies kept me indoors and my escape was drawing. Eventually I outgrew my cage. The rain fell upon me and I grew thirsty to see the wonders of the world. My explorations in art is my great love affair with this life and Earth, my creations like children, born in adventure and travel.
My work has evolved to become multidimensional as Ive studied the and seen the treasures of the ancients. My biggest influences are the Mayans fluid and anthrpormorphic style. Mc Ecsher, Dali, William Blake, Picasso, Eyptians, Precolombians, and probably even Aliens. I try not to take my art very seriously, that would rob it of its whimsical expressiveness. I much prefer free roaming monsters which dance across my works to seated pre-planned tyrants; penciled inked, and colored, representing control, expectation, disappointing the imagination through copy.
I can take a single square canvas and have its edges form the center of at least 8 distinct images when mirrored. My art is alive, it needs its shadow and reflection to be complete. Powerful works that expand the mind, and engadge the subconcious to play and transform along with the morphing lines at various depth and distance.
Some work is hichol indian like, as if a peyote trip was manifest on flat canvas. X-ray vision, glimmering traces of multiple dimensions converging in colorful explosions of form. In my quest to bombard my viewers imagination I've found no end to the rabbit hole of infinate images that flow from each other within the individual microcosms.
My work represents a life time of curiosity, play, ritual, and discovery. The more I create the closer I feel to the universe and this rare gem of a blue planet we call home. The deeper I look, the more I see, and beauty and wonder only truley matter we share them with each other. Our creativity and connection as human beings inspire me to share my singularity and journeys into the depths of the collective imagination and the physical world.
I often have dreams where I create murals, filling empty spaces by telekinetically moving a brush at impossibe speeds. As I've learned to control my dreams, I've honed my vision to see and bring to life the unseen worlds which surround us. I often awake from a dream and remember strange and amazing images that later come to life in my art work. I've taken to heart the Master Picasso's advice to steal into my mind all the images created by man and nature, and unleash them furiously into my visionary process as I shapeshift into a force of nature just long enough to create some fearful monster with an insatiable appetite for more. Yes, true art is war.
If I don't feel like Im playing, I feel like I'm making art "work" and not "art play"- If it was work I sure as hell wouldn't want to do it. I think everyone should be expressing themselves through art in some way to feel balanced and connected. After all modern written language evolved from pictograms and human drawings from nature. I believe art making can curb one's desire for blind consumerism and satisfy the need to express what words alone cannot.
Art is dead as are most of it's champions, senseless studio art reins and random still life studies oversaturate supermarket galleries like factory produced furniture. My art lives and breaths apart from the Artworld's circus. Its made outside of the realms of the studio and retains its spirit. Art is made in glacier caves which could collapse at any moment or high on Alaskan mountain tops where hungry bears roam free. Created inside sacred monuments, overlooking tombs of histories deities, places full of memory and human spirit, My process is risky, and my life's work a gamble for the coin of success, and although I may get bitten, poisoned, frozen, ran over, arrested, drowned, robbed, killed, struck by lightening, or eaten, I will not stop creating it wherever I may be.
Drawings born in sketchbooks on planes trains boats, submarines, buses, and helicopters- I find inspiration in constant movement, and danger. When I'm standing still in my Laguna Beach studio, looking out at the peaceful ocean horizon Im inspired to produce my most complex and violent works. As i stand still my mind knows I am standing on a giant globe spinning at great speed on lopsided ball surrounded by a frozen blackness. My mind races to all the places Ive seen, and I long for escape into point of the pen or brush where anything is possible.
I love drawing from life, stumbling across a dangling sloth in a tree and silently capturing his form. Drawing a famous rockstar a few seats over on the plane. Drawing as I sweat and walk in a humid 110 degree Egyptian tomb. In jungles where strange and exotic insects land on me at random transforming me by their presence into a warm soft tree branch, befriending them, balancing them on my finger to study, drawing them while they move about as they please. Action writing prayer like text that resembles Zen poetry as the sun rises before 500 fellow pilgrims high on a mountain top named Sinai. Recalling the size and colors of large scorpion fish hovering 25 feet under Red Sea coral walls. Treasures I hold my breath to see, and dive deeply to spy. Surrounded by swarming blue barracuda, absorbing all the life and wonder to later interpret upon surfacing to the dry hot world above. I see little need to draw realistically and become a copy machine artist, but if Im staring face to face with a DaVinci painting I simply have to sit and draw it to the best of my skill taking a lesson from the master himself. To see Rembrant's movement and life in his signature brush strokes transports me back in time. Tracing bizarre shadows of fence and leaf cast by a changing street light on the wall of a Kyoto Temple at midnight, or sitting on the point of the east facing building J ruin on the plato of Monte Alban Oaxaca tracing its edge, or collaborating with an artist friend on freezing febuary nights in Maine until dawn arrives again. Sitting under the stars next to Uluru, drawing them one by one under the shadow casting starlite canopy, hoping a deadly spider doesn't crawl up my leg as a bouncing kangaroo leapfrogs me. Drawing a mural on the plywood wall of the South Pole after 40 days without darkness. Painting room after room in a Mexico City hotel next door to Dieogo Rivera's famous murals at the Nation palace. Graffiting in an Osaka elevator, after sketching on a smooth bullet train ride and skateboarding through crowded Japanese streets.
Guards ordering me to put away my tireless sketch book as I stand drawing the actual death mask of King Tut. Secretly taking pictures of the famed Carravagio Medusa shield in Florence to draw later from my own actual photo of the historical object.
taking advantage of the age of travel and freedom that awaits outside the classroom. Inspired by the great explorers and artist of history who documented and mapped the places and peoples of the world over centuries. From Alaska's northern lights and beyond the glaciers of Patagonia all the way to the frozen ends of the earth at the South Pole. The human imagination is still the greatest frontier open to mankind. Worlds without fences a playground without end. !0,000 times greater than the travel channels pixels, the wonders of the world are not things that should only be read about, they should be seen, touched and cherished. Breathing life into that incredible organic machine inside the brain. I hope my travels as an artist can inspire others to conquer fears of the unknown and let curiosity open up the door to adventure and art making in all its forms.
travel and skateboarding, dreams,inspired
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