Thanks for your curiosity!
As I see it, the name near an artwork is likely to shape the encounter hugely. A title is a series of sounds. Words with their own history and associations, their own pull. Whatever I call these works, the work itself is still paint on canvas, and the names I give them carry my history with the painting, not yours. With this website format, I am hoping what you see, and what you choose to call artwork and how you can describe it can show me something I hadn’t seen, open a new way into my own work, point toward something I haven’t made yet or possibly help me title the piece for other people to see what you saw.
And if you spend enough time with a painting to give it a name, maybe something shifts between you and it ;). I’d be glad if it did!
Want to know more?
I’ve thought of myself as an artist since childhood.
In High School, I threw myself into drapery, light, shadow, and the way a surface could feel alive, trying to follow the great painters as faithfully as I could. I did my AP Art Portfolio focussed on drapery. Later, I tried to make art could function as activism – what I knew could derogatorily be called “propaganda,” The artists I love most who tried to make activist artwork didn’t succeed at changing public opinion. For making good art, it was a bit of a distraction. For a while, it was such a distraction that I veered into the field of design instead of Fine Art.
I want to be a genuine visual artist though. Visual art can do something an argument or poem can’t. There are things below the threshold of the visual cortex that a painting can reach and that a title, an explanation, or even a very good sentence can only get near. I don’t think that’s mysticism. It’s closer to what serious music can do, or what a room full of morning light can do. At best, making art is a religious act for me. Something gets communicated that couldn’t have been sent any other way.
How I got to this admittedly eccentric place of manifesting with this website?
I spent years working in market research, which gave me a strange amount of time to watch how differently people receive the same thing, how much a person’s history, mood, longing, and attention shape what they actually find in front of them. In painting, the viewer is never passive. You bring something to this that I could not have put there myself.
