"Beauty created by God is nature. Beauty created by man is art." -Immanuel Kant, 1790 A strong aspect of my of my work is "finding beautiful." This discovery process has become a driving force of my art making. I am once again rearranging studio spaces, and have been reorganizing my art. Much of it was from my undergrad days, and it's been fun to revisit some of these oldies. I looked for beauty in landscapes, beauty in people, in portraiture, in faces. Looking at my early paintings in particular, I can see happiness in my brush strokes. One my instructors once told me that. He said he could tell from my paintings that I was happy. At the time, I didn't know what he meant. I looked at my paintings and saw my frustration with an ellipse, my struggles with perspective, my uneasy attempts at a natural sense of space. I see it now though. I see the brushstrokes as works of joy.
I search for the beautiful has continued. I look for beauty that is beyond a visual aesthetic, more than what lies on the surface. I use the visual aesthetic as a means to represent powerful feelings of passion and wonder and other unnamed emotions. These feelings and desires are part of what makes us alive. And life is a beautiful thing.