artist statement

Relics of Industry, Disasters/Recoveries, and Our Dreams of Flying series, watercolor, gouache and drawing on paper. 2020-21, ongoing.

 A painting can provide a context wider than human life, giving us solace and expanded frame of reference. My recent thematic paintings are often triggered by examination of found and collected photographs. They are depiction of obsolete technologies, forgotten disasters, and long-ago events, ideas, and obscure lives of (misunderstood) people. They are less about representation then evocation, and more about a dynamic idea of history; one that is always mutable and reflective of subjective infinite narrative potentials.

 Faulkner states that "The past is never dead. It's not even past."  Yet Goethe says, “Happiness looks neither forward nor backward.” Indeed, the present is the only reality that belongs to us.  My work can be seen as a document of collapsed time, ruminations on the past, but also a quest to understand the present; an exploration of the murkiness that lays between that Faulkner’s past (that’s not even past), and Goethe’s Arcadian now.

An artist may feel that he is able to access that wider context where, somehow, the linear time is suspended, and where past and present freely coexist. She/He is allowed a privilege to look once again for new connections, the intervals of time, space, change, growth, betterment, joy…. all the complexities of lived experiences.

In my own work, a lingering desire persists to illuminate such uncanny, sensory realities, hoping that the initial observational rigor gives way to intuitive and imaginative appreciation - embracing both moments of clarity and moments of blurriness and enigma, and accepting that we cannot know or predict the outcome, and that the things will unfold in ways that will surprise us. Just as the way in which history wiggles and turns, and where nothing is ever really resolved, it is a series of endless beginnings and repetitions, where you just exhale - one long sigh, and then move on to the next one.