Statement
This is not a definitive statement of war. This is just a beginning. I'm looking for my vocabulary…the color…the texture. It's a learning process incorporating landscape, color, composition, using canvas as soil.
Judge this show as an opening paragraph, as to how I am seeing today, in terms of my painting in the last several months, and prints in the last two years and the triptych in progress. In the triptych the graphics create an experience of immediacy. The immediate impact-that's what graphics are about. It is a sharp image that's mirrored into your mind, slammed into your consciousness.
Why did I pick Bosnia? The fact that people were once neighbors as families and had a common existence. In the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo, people talked about how friendly it was. And, ten years later they are tearing themselves up in a horrific war. In dealing with this subject in art, I'm exploring the possibility of expressing the horror and still come up with some hope. There's a need to experience hope. Without hope there is no existence. Even in war there has to be hope…to experience the horrors of war and that there is something greater on the other side.
Very important to me is the ever-lingering horizon line as it relates to the figure within space (distance). Space is a series of horizon lines, of a reality beyond, that leads to another and another. Reality beyond that leads to infinity, endless self. Distance and space in relation to one's self, is the beginning of infinity…my journey through infinity as I see it. As an existentialist, my relationship to infinity is a series of horizon lines as I go through each moment. If there is an answer, there is no answer, only experience of the answer.
I am trying to find my dialogue reaching for color to bring my viewer in. Now trying to find a footing relating to color, trying to find a dialogue, the visual experience. The sky, the earth, the brutality the destruction. I try to remain loose while searching for form and dialogue and presentation. I don't see this series as something that just hangs on the wall--rather, it becomes personal. I need to bring you in, to experience what I experience. Series of events and feelings to reach for the inner realm. It's a statement of a series of feelings, not an intellectual process. Reaching out through a series of experience, that may or may not come to some conclusion or insight. I'm not trying to search for or delve into a subject matter that goes beyond man's understanding of love and feeling peace. The subject of this art needs to be experienced, talked about, to be brought to some conclusion. I want to evoke conflicting feelings and thoughts. Create a searching for a means of understanding visually. Bring together a dialogue from me to you of what would normally be, for the viewer, too untouchable, too horrific. I would like to see this as a beginning, only to delve deeper each year into another phase. Painting to me is a personal thing, it is a feeling. I want to share this experience.
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