Beauty

"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.

Art and Beauty

Art is war. I'm pretty sure any artist could tell you that. The career path of an artist is rarely clearly marked, and often, we must forge our own. It's a balancing act of the day job, responsibilities, commitments, and personal health. I find that I become most stressed when I am unable to determine what the priority is. Everything can seem equally important, but everything cannot always be done. My work at Gallery 6 looks good. It's a creative space, and I enjoyed seeing the display. The show was well selected, with a nice variety and consistency.

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The show was titled Discovering Beauty, and it provoked me to think about the idea of beauty more thoroughly. It has always been an important aspect of my work and I appreciated the opportunity to farther explore the topic. I focused on these ideas in relevance to the work on display:

Explorations of Time and Space

In a single moment, we register images, smells, sounds and words, and link it to our past, present and future. Reality is layered. Beauty exist in the overlap. The world is seen through many eyes, and thousands of realities exist in a single space. My work expresses the layers of reality, and the duality of perception and the truth. It is a journey through these layers, and exploration of what is seen and what is felt. Photographs capture an instant, and layers of photographs read as a film strip, showing how time passes. Painting and distortion reflect on the deception of what we see. I embrace imperfections of my varying processes to emphasize the beauty of what we cannot predict.

All things perceived are temporal, only lasting a moment, vanishing with the light. The spirit endures beyond the dusk of the flesh. Repetition of sunsets reiterates the series of days. Life is made up of moments that cannot always be seen all at once. Our bodies are as a ticking clock, with an ever nearing end, yet the decay of mortality is beautiful. Birds and flight are represented in my work as a means to escape from the traps on routine. Our spirits can fly beyond what we can see. Discovering the freedom is the most beautiful part of life, allowing us to move between the layers.