Making art for a living in the early 21st Century
I was born to be a painter. It's what I do. It seems as if everyone has their own definition of painting now, so I will deliver mine in kind.
I believe that true painters really paint. That's not to say that painters who paint cannot do other things that can fall under the painting umbrella, but in order to be a part of this special tribe, you must be able to apply paint to a surface with some kind of talent. To make things more complicated, I also believe that the best painters posses brilliant drawing skills. Drawing allows an artist to refine his or her abilities to see forms, ideas and compositions work together so that their paintings actually work. Drawing is also a visual shorthand for what the artist is seeing and thinking, which is a vital human function.
It has become trendy to disregard basic principals of visual presentation - and in rare cases it's justified. In the best cases, the artist that has broken the rules already knows what they are and has broken them with purposeful technique. True painters understand this challenge and have spent years working the edge of content and style, forming and sculpting the details of their ideological perspective. This is not a process that plays out over a few months or a few years - it's a lifetime worth of development.
What I hope for is a lasting record of my views on this strange, short life. The world doesn't need another still life or bucolic travelogue scene or expressionist texture. I hope that people will think more deeply and be a little more confused after looking at my work. I believe that people engage with things they do not understand, which is a primal instinct. Our survival depends on retaining our abilities to encounter confusing things without immediately fleeing the scene. Our modern visual language is a user interface that is carefully designed to be a learned set of behaviors. The behaviors are familiar routines that become second nature and are comforting in their reliability. Confusion is the antithesis of comfort and reliability - there is no dialect or accessible behavior for it, and yet without it we are all destined to be stripped of our creative capacity.
Whack futurist - social pirate - contrarian? Not so - I am simply part of an elite tribe of artists who have done all this instinctually without elaborate rhetoric and pseudo-intellectual thesis. Bacon, Rauch, Dali, Seville. Daniel Lazama. I could fill this page, but it would just reinforce the obvious: I am not alone.