In trying to make a piece of art that makes sense, the texture of the thing, its tactile presence is important, a necessary component. Also, the process. It is the process, I feel, that can give the thing meaning. Process, the methods and conditions by which the piece is wrought, packs a certain potential, energy into the piece which might be accessed later by a viewer.
I carry on a kind of desperate search for meaning and where it resides. I am fairly certain that it does not exist in anything intrinsically and this puts me into a fit or crises of uncertainty. My confusion over what is meaningful causes me to question conventions, morality, limits… I try to put these energies, the confusion, passion, anxiety, desperate yearning, into the making of the piece.
I try all different kinds of materials and utilize a mixed-media aesthetics. I use electronic parts, pieces of metal, try tar, various resins, glitter, weird, cheap paints, whatever I can get, and see what they will do together. I often use a small blowtorch, burning areas to sizzling char. All these to burden or overload the recurring illustrative impulse of making a pictorial representation of something.
I had started with drawing, feeling that there’s something fundamental, foundational in its practice. And, I was always attracted to drawing things, depicting characters engaged in circumstances. Coming of age in L.A. in the 80’s, meant being exposed to a range of new wave graphics, cartoons, and illustrations, including the work of Ralph Steadman, Robert Williams, Bill Sienkiewicz, Sue Coe, Enki Bilal, Antonio Lopez, and others. (I was also so impressed by an exhibition of German Expressionist paintings I saw at LACMA).
My early impulses were in this mode of expressionistic illustrations. I think my tendency was more illustrative, but that I didn’t trust it or feel comfortable with it. I did not want narrative or representational coherence. This seemed too easy and dishonest, wrong. The artists mentioned above pointed to ways illustrations might be folded and disintegrated into other approaches, in complex, confusing, organic, or expressionistic ways. I sought to break apart my illustrative inclinations in my deconstructive questioning and my experimental processes.
Thickening the surface with layers and texture can frustrate the representations and keep them from forming. It is this tension between symbolic, pictorial representation and abstract, expressionistic, textural surfaces, that interests me, and the confounding, really, of them both. The thick, mish-mash surface ontology is a kind of representation in itself, but it represents a different order, in a different way, pointing to a sludge-like, ambiguous mental state. Thick, unsophisticated, crude and oppressive textural process as confused, desperate thinking.
To make a piece heavily loaded with so much difference that it collapses somewhere in the middle, and fails in a startling, overblown way, seems an exciting prospect. Especially for one constantly tormented with thoughts that don’t seem to lead anywhere, or whose destination doesn’t seem nearly as important as the quality and experience of the actual thinking.