Longer Artist Statement
For as long as I can remember, people have said that I’m an angry person or that I’m too angry, or that I have “anger issues”. And it’s true. I am an angry person. But that anger is a vital part of what filters through my hand and into my drawings and photographs. As such, I thought it might be enlightening to make a list of things that perpetually make me angry: I’m angry when I don’t know what to do with myself; I’m angry when I need to get something done and can’t find the motivation to do it; I’m angry when people drive passive-aggressively, recklessly, don’t use their blinkers, or drive too slowly in the fast lane; I’m angry when someone says I’m too angry, or when someone confuses an impassioned outburst with anger; I’m angry when I’m at a crowded bar and someone bumps me without excusing themselves; I’m angry at Christians and Christianity, in general; I’m angry at tired arguments; I’m angry at people who talk like they have something to prove; I’m angry at people who make art like they have something to prove; I’m angry at people who choose fancy talk when plain talk would do just fine; I’m angry at people who think that their unhappy existence is their lot in life; I’m angry at belligerence and misogyny and infidelity and dishonesty and arrogance and ignorance and the suffering we all cause one another; I’m angry at us all for misappropriating the lessons of history for our own political agendas, rather than seeing them nakedly, unfiltered through our selves; I’m angry at the overproduction of worthless shit we’re supposed to buy, which is supposed to add worth to our lives; I’m angry at the overproduction of necessities that go to landfills when impoverished peoples are in desperate, mortal need; I’m angry at the presence of sports in academic environments, or more specifically at the ridiculous amount of funding collegiate sports teams receive while art departments struggle to support their agendas and people; I’m angry at jocks who ride longboards and act like they’re one with the flow; I’m angry at people who have audible conversations at concerts that one hears over the music, in movies that one hears them over the film, or in classrooms while professors are speaking; I’m angry when people I love inexplicably don’t communicate with me for long periods of time; I’m angry when artists ruin a beautiful drawing by turning it into a crappy painting; I’m angry at people who resign to lives they don’t want rather than fight to the death for the lives they do want; I’m angry that people want lives that lack meaning; I’m angry at people who cop out; I’m angry at people who condescend to or dismiss my anger as the simple extension of some emotional/psychological flaw they perceive in me rather than take into consideration what it is I’m expressing anger towards. Sometimes, my anger embarrasses me. Other times it inspires me to do or say things I regret or have to apologize for. Still other times my anger triggers depression or apathy or fear or rage. But I always embrace it, and I’m always thankful for it, for I can imagine what I might have resigned my life to thinking, believing or doing if I hadn’t forged myself in the flames of annoyance, angst, rage, heartbreak, misanthropy, maladjustment, distrust and disbelief.
Shorter Artist Statement
With some exceptions, my work generally channels a “less is more” sentiment. Crude, or reductive, gestures might betray a critique of materiality, form and the mark. Meanwhile, figures trudge and traipse through landscapes, cityscapes, voidscapes, emerging from or collapsing into shadows and stains and scrawls and blots, desperately distanced from the palpable, the tangible, the physical. Contemplating the murder of childhood dreams and the ensuing, unavoidable suicide of adulthood; lamenting the death of the touch and our whole-hearted embrace of dissatisfaction, all compounded by our utter descent into the negative feedback loop caused by the failure of history, my work hopes to help viewers hit absolute bottom. This achieved, we might each begin to break through the putrescent decay of all that was once hopeful in us and regurgitate the repugnant fruit of false transcendence back into God’s infantile, starving face-hole so that He might choke on it and finally free us from this most ridiculous construct of ours.
