Statements
Artist statement
I make art and have been since I was 15 years old — over 50 years. Geometry and intense color are important elements of my work. Besides painting I have made sculptures, ceramics and designed typefaces / computer fonts.
In the 1970s I began incorporating twigs and branches into my work for reasons I cannot explain. And I have always had an affinity for inexplicable ritual and magical objects that — like much primitive art — try to evoke other forces. My influences are Delacroix, Van Gogh, Radnitsky, Pollock, Poons and others.
I also have suffered from clinical depression and ADHD for most of my life thought it was not diagnosed until my late 50s.
Anti Artist Statement
Ah yes, I wrote an artist statement for my work explaining what I think I am doing, Having spent time discussing my work with people I have found that unless someone has an adequate knowledge of art history they don't always grasp what I am talking about.
Have you read DaVinci's artist statement or Picasso's, Delacroix's, Titian's, Jackson Pollocks? Or what about the guy whose water color painting of flowers you saw at an art fair a year or two ago?
The artist statement is not about art but marketing. The artist statement, for better or worse, is supposed to help though it usually doesn't. Artists are not very good at verbally explaining what they are doing. If they were they would be writers, not artists. None of this is for the benefit of artists but for people looking for money making opportunities.
Once long ago art galleries were rather elitist institutions and they were as much about educating people about art as selling it to them
An art gallery is a retail business like any other and its product must be marketed to people like a furniture store, stocking what products it thinks it can sell and if it can't sell them, then dropping them. There is still an educational aspect though it often is more akin to advertising. It is no longer about what is art, but what can be pawned off on people as "art" by those whose main intent is to make money.
So now artist's must market themselves to galleries like manufacturing sales people and pity the poor artist who can't come up with some sort of statement about why they make art and what it is about. The problem is that art is neither easy to explain nor to understand. The average person has little or no appreciation of art so virtually anything someone calls art — like things made from dryer lint — they assume to be art which is not true nor ever has been. The question of what is or is not arty has never been in question. Marcel Duchamp made this very explicit in his work "Fountain" which was a urinal. Whatever an artist says is art is art. The true question is who is really an artist and who is a poser or just some guy cranking out some artsy-craftsy junk to sell.
True art also has a density to it. Human beings are apparently on a quest for simplicity — partly a reflection of the notion that there is one idea, one result, one answer, and partly in an attempt to deal with the complexity of the world around them — even while we are submerged in a sea of complexity so vast we cannot even perceive how vast. One thing leads to another, one act causes a result which itself become another cause. From the first act of the first human we have been riding an unending wave of cause and effect that we can only interact with and not control to any degree.
Even our idea of "truth" is at best biased, incomplete, and malleable to the extent that some people believe what they consider truth even when it flies in the face of facts. Long ago some people were convinced the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth and other nonsense, insisting it was "true." Agendas of ideology, emotion, politics, bias and outright lack of sense or sanity have thwarted people from understanding things.
So how can an artist, even the most eloquent, say anything that would make anyone understand their art? One would think that talking about what a work of art "means," would be a start, but art has no more meaning than loving another person or a pet or ones children. Or what meaning is there in a sunset or a sunrise or any other event? Artists cannot explain why they make art anymore than one can explain how they came to be alive on earth.