This Is the First Show of My Paintings Ever. This Is the Culmination of All the Artwork

This Is the First Show of My Paintings Ever. This Is the Culmination of All the Artwork

BREAKTHROUGH 2011

This is the first show of my paintings ever. This is the culmination of all the artwork I have been doing in my life. It is a breakthrough because it is the result of a spiritual, mental, and artistic breakthrough which has allowed me to come closer to achieving my artistic goal of expressing my inner emotions in a visual way that most viewers can truly empathically feel what I was when I painted the work.

My influences Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, and Romantic landscape painters such as Frederic Edwin Church and Caspar David Friedrich are clear in my nature influence evidenced in the textures, colors, and forms composing my emotive abstractions. Each piece has some reference to nature whether it is a cloud, mountain texture, sunrise effect, lightning, or even just a feeling one gets looking at a stream. But the abstraction is not done for ease, but rather for the immediacy and lack of realistic imagery that often influences viewers away from pure emotion.

The breakthroughs here are many…the development of textural use…the integration of glass into canvas works…and the use of the canvas as a confidant. Through the turmoil of this past year, I found the canvas to be the best listener with no judgment, confusion, or interruption. It absorbs my emotions then reflects them back to me. It allows me to see myself in a truer sense. This has been a cathartic and evolutionary process for me on all levels.

The symbolism is somewhat primal. Color theory and the psychology of color has long been a study of mine. In addition, texture has always been a primary concern in my work. The mirror and glass is meant to put the viewer into the work to literally put you in my feeling space – true empathy. Please see the key below to better understand the work. These works were made to further understanding, and although they are deeply autobiographical, I offer them as a way to help spark other breakthroughs.

Red – Passion

Orange – Down to Earth, Earthly, Grounded

Yellow – Anxiety

Green – Calm Nature, Health

Blue – Serenity, Peace, Deep Spirituality, Melancholy

Purple – Mind

Black –Negative

White – Positive, Purity, Energy

Iridescence – Spiritual self, True Beauty

Complementary colors – force and harmony of opposites

Texture – the visceral body and all things tangible and sometimes felt

Glass – A veil to what is behind it

Mirror – The true reflection of the viewer’s soul as a mirror is a true reflective device.