Portraits 2017

In 2016 -2017 I was thinking about how I could portray the angst, anger and resentment of the political and social climate of the election year without referencing it through obvious pathways. I was looking for something that I could do that would be a step or two away from actual events, so I decided to work on a series of paintings and drawings that depict artists and curators as a way to convey something about the political zeitgeist of the time. I chose artists and curators because they are a group of people who strive to communicate the hidden reaches of interpretation and present a more profound form of expression.

Each time you step further away from the source material, distortion and bias grow, as each person interprets and gives meaning to events differently. I try to interpret and communicate in theses portraits, each person’s awareness and reaction to the current reality, and show a deeper awareness of the political and social atmosphere in which we live.

I chose to represent the face, as it is the most identifiable and expressive part of the human form, and by offering multiple angles and views of the same subject, it shows the many facets and angles that each person perceives and emanates. The interaction between the many layers references my previous work, by using hard edge forms and multiple glazes, I create relationships between the foreground, middle ground and background that communicates the interconnections between our various subjective planes of reality and exemplifies the complexity of each individuals personality and the different ways we are perceived. Each fragmented portraits covers and reveals itself, the underlying forms and images capturing the compiled complexity of the moment.

The pen and ink drawings take the idea of layering and stacks image over image while rendering them to paper. There are as many as 50 charcoal sketches that are laid down and then erased from the each portrait before an ink drawing is rendered over the top as a final layer, completing the fragmented representation of our interior and exterior worlds.