ARTIST STATEMENT

Your eyes must sense this abstract series about searching for reality. To find elusive answers, viewers must search in every experience.  Do humans know consciousness because someone tells them its real? How can people distinguish lies from truth? I deeply desire viewers to perceive. Bright mixtures of paint are inspired by floaters in the eyes and the intuition in the mind.  These colors beckon the eye’s attention and hope to stir intuition instead of logical thought.  

Symptoms of eye floaters include small shapes appearing in vision as dark specks, transparent strings of cellular material. Floaters don’t allow one to look directly at them; they float out of view.  Spots are most noticeable looking at a bright background, such as blue sky or bright computer screen. Floaters stand for everything experienced daily. Working in an office I see floaters daily. My eye doctor said they were leftover cellular material from developing as a fetus.   

This same cellular debris is the physical lens between me and the world.  Spirituality is not separate from physical laws but is illusive in a world based on 5 senses.  The 6th being intuition.  Philosophical ineptitude matches this floater experience.  Truth seems evasive.  Norms feel made-up.  Emotion and intuition roam with the paint brush in search of its place on the canvas. This abstract series is based on spiritual investigation into ancestral instinct from DNA.  Intuition is true knowledge.  

Enlightenment is not discovered in a book, neither are definitions found in these paintings.  The senses fail to answer unsolved riddles, the heart yearns for meaning and the hands dapple the canvas with feelings that have no verbal explanation.  The physical and spiritual detach from the mind.  Painting openly allows DNA to speak.  Color expresses personal experiences, deep blues, purples, reds paired alongside electric pinks, greens and oranges dig into the psyche.  Stop the words, numbers, calculations, jobs, social media, and look within.  

Painting an entire piece of paper one color as a child felt powerful, each tone’s effect was unique. The search for ideologies in books leads back to what we know innately as children.  Knowing comes when detached from external forces. Artists often beg viewers to LOOK and FEEL. Artists such as Andy Warhol, Basquiat, Grace Jones, Prince, Kurt Vonnegut, David Lynch, and Stanley Kubrick are skilled at implication.  People continue to ask questions when they know the answer. 

External philosophical searching in vain, I already knew.  Inspiration and understanding must come from within.  Visual art is unique in representing something unrepresented anywhere else.  Allow it to do so. 

Previous works searched; this work finds. 

 I hope people feel and search for meaning. Those who don’t find meaning may feel like cracking jokes, feel uncomfortable, try to guess what I painted, or may not understand.  Maybe they will leave, wondering what the point could be.  However, those who search will find what they seek.