New Sculptures

I am often asked why do I make art? The answer is simple, and hard. Art is my chosen language of expression. It is the lens though which I view the world, the sum total of my experiences.

It is a fragmented language, one in which many of the terms seem difficult to define or appear contradictory. I work in the language of contemporary abstraction trying to make sense of the seeming randomness of my myriad experiences. A difficult task as the bulk of painting in abstraction is largely seen to have split into two branches, formalist and conceptual approaches.

Conceptual artists stress the fact that their art works are abstract, in the manner of language, rather than representational or figurative. At the same time, formalist painting utilizes abstraction by emphasizing compositional elements such as color or line, rather than realistic depiction of figures and appeals to the viewer through gesture, scale and the physicality of paint.

Why should we care? Who would even recognize this split? And what does it have to do with art making? The answer is not simple, but art is often seen as a struggle to synthesize opposites, and in so doing helps me not only to better understand art, but better understand the world around me. As Kandinsky once said, Art is the child of its age and the mother of our emotions.

My own work seeks to build on the explorations of both conceptual and formalist abstraction, borrowing the framework of conceptual art, the stripe and the grid, while incorporating the formalist imagery, using reference to earlier art, found images, clip art and text. This juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated figures, texture, and pattern creates a kind of ambiguity of imagery comparable to the conceptual underpinnings of minimalist and post minimalist art, bridging the gap between the two interpretations of abstraction.

In a similar way my sculptural works appear as eccentrically shaped, modestly scaled abstract sculptures with crusty surfaces. They are made of plaster, papier-mâché, wire, fabric and other ordinary materials. But their surfaces reflect the evocative brushwork of the American Abstract Expressionist with their loaded brushwork, the whiplash line, poured paint, and the palette knife. To the Abstract Expressionist distinctive gestures mattered. The mark of the artist was as distinguishing as the artist’s signature, thus the mark becomes a kind of figure. In this way the sculptures reflect the anti-form movement of the post minimalist artist like Eva Hesse joined to the formalist trends of Abstract Expressionism.