Painting 1398

My work is a culmination of my experience with color, design and painting. It stems from the human desire to find familiarity from marks and shapes. When I was a child I would stare at the ceiling or textures on the wall and notice the forms it would create by the street lights coming into my bedroom. There were things moving and dancing and fighting. Faces and creatures would come alive by nothing more than a few bumps or marks on the surface. I’d see color where there was none. This isn’t unique to me. This is a phenomenon humans experience like seeing faces and shapes in cloud formations. It is called pareidolia. Though in this case I’m trying to find appealing shapes while I work or soon after the paint dries. Sometimes when  I close my eyes or stare into a dark room these shapes come alive as well and for years I’ve tried to grab them, but they would escape after a second and new shapes would replace those. No image could ever stay long enough for me to get a substantial memory of it. These paintings are my attempts at capturing these forms before they vanish. Most of them take a few seconds while others can take several attempts, but the idea is to move fast and use different surfaces. Some porous. Some slick. Depending on the paper or ground I apply. My materials are palette knives, spraying tools, needle nose ink dispensers and anything I have found walking in the street through the years. I use acrylics, inks, watercolors and mixtures that I have collected over the years on discarded 35 millimeter film canisters. This is the way I’ve been working since 2010. I’ve painted thousands of these small paintings. Each one labelled with a number. With each new painting comes a new excitement of something that could not have been created or exist in any other way. That is part of the excitement I feel when I paint and create them.