Artist's Statement
My art is a record of childlike discovery - a conscious step away from that which appears sophisticated beyond my character. I constantly reacquaint myself with a child's vision, working in series with whatever's around (aprons, bugs, table scraps, car parts). There is an honesty and innocence in a child's approach to creating; both primitive and naive, their art evokes the simplest of rituals and stories within their armslength world. They are not concerned with making art, much less making good art. They are alert to wonder, curious of nature. They ask directly to sort the un from the predictable so they may be free to learn more, laugh more, and live more. Creating is fun to a child, and is indistinguishable from play. I am at best when I am as a child and play. There I find freedom, love, and honesty. It makes little difference whether the act of creating produces a basket, print, poem, or an installation.
Everywhere in my works one finds silly creatures or people in awkward and unlikely situations. The characters are often interrupted by mark-making incongruous with the very nature of the piece, creating a kind of humour. Caught in an open but beguiling narrative, there characters balance tentatively between reality and fantasy (as between pea soup and sea poop). Discarded objects, humanity's trash, provides another type of vocabulary for my art. Junk is a metaphor in my art for man's mistakes. Interacting with characters, the junk is as frail as life, inculcated with acceptance and forgiveness in my art. They reveal an interest I have always had in the use of inconsistent subject matter and techniques of mark-making in the same piece.
Everywhere the art seems to trip over itself. Getting up to try again, scribble becomes smoke from a chimney or a wave of an ocean. Mistakes are offered and owned as honest, valid acts. Mistakes are a regression, a necessary step to progression. Even my second persona, Rip, is a probable self assisting in supporting the errors. My art, then, becomes a time to play, not a thing to make. It is an art of absurd narratives, unpretentious mark-making, and non-art. This art does not impose a seriousness as "high art" but impresses the viewer as that which could only be made from playful discipline. As Picasso stated, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain one once he grows up."
Artwork
Ceramics
Toy Sculptures
Statement
Much of the work I have done as an artist in the last ten years has been through my investigation of the possibilities of handmade paper. I have had the good fortune to receive two grants to work at Twinrocker Mills in Brookston, Indiana under the instruction of Kathryn Clark, the founder of the oldest handmade paper mill in the United States. One of the many things I love about work in paper pulp is the simplicity and clarity of the medium. While one can make the technicalities of working with paper quite complicated, creating pieces of handmade paper art comes down to pulp, water and hard work.
In the same way, these sculptures are built simply using nothing more than smashed toy parts and a hot glue gun. These small sculptures really grew out of an assignment that has become a tradition in one of my advanced classes at Plaza Park Middle School. In searching for a simple way middle school students could investigate three dimensional compositions such that they would not get mired down in technical issues, I began to collect discarded toys. The next step was to run them over in such a way that the smashed parts could begin again as new parts.
When I began to make a few of them myself I immediately thought of John Chamberlain's huge abstract metal "paintings" that from smashed cars and airplanes. Of the ones I have seen, they are a three dimensional rendition of DeKooning, Kline, or many of the other bull painters from the 1950's Action painters. At first my small versions reminded me of what appears to be mockettes for an imaginary larger monumental sculpture. However, my real intention was to use the bulldozed parts of discarded toys to build "accidental toys." I really have no deep meaning behind the pieces...they were built, not analyzed. As an artist I was challenged by all the abstract parts still slightly recognizable as toys or toy parts but ready to begin a new life as their own quirky sidekicks.
Irregardless of the jumbled look of the pieces, and their childlike primary colors, I believe the pieces are ridiculously recycled tragedies. I tried to keep the seriousness or formalness of the pieces from dominating their presence by tipping parts of them precariously, or by adding an unexpected part at an edge during their construction. I am intending them to call to the viewer, not with the noises they once made as bright, shiny new toys, but with a combination of new sounds that redefines their worth from the discarded junk bin.
