Statement of intent

I realized earlier that I had not posted my artist statement of intent anywhere on this site. So, following the paintings post, here is a more brief version of my statement of intent.

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I am interested in creating images as an entry point to view the projected manifestation of desire, the mortality of the flesh, and the topography of history and memory.
It is about the intersections of loss and desire; an inextricable balance of presence and memory. It is also about the psychology of what it means to bear witness, or even what it means to be forcibly turned askance from an event.
On a formal level, the content of my work is fixed and stable, yet filled with a degree of instability, confusion and nausea through the obscuration of the subject matter. It heavily relies on the idea of the perception of the image; the denial of the versimilitudinous nature of images. This implicates an imminent downfall, hypoxia, and quietus within the work itself, which is thus muted within it’s own anxiety, somewhere between truth and a void.

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Various Paintings 2009-2010

Some Various works of mine from this past year (2009-2010).

Enjoy.

"Self Portrait" 2010. Gouache on panel.

Bundled and layered in the freezing studio, fall 2009.

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Elm
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BY SYLVIA PLATH
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I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.