hybrids, death, space, meaning, fear, puppets, and other ramblings.

Knowing why I do what I do is important to me, but it can also be a burden. I really have the tendencies to over-think just about everything, including my art work. My work has made leaps and bounds in the last couple months. It has been a hard run discovering these new images and wrestling with their meaning. There is a lot of personal experience imbedded in my pictures. I know for a fact this is why I run away from everything new I create. My images create a dichotomy between my life and what painting is. They mediate what is. I think the thing I fear the most about my pictures, is that not even I can understand them. I know other people won't "get" what it's about, and I don't expect them to. It's important to me though--to analyze them and often when I do, I see a lot of myself in them. 

The hybrid idea has taken on a whole new meaning. It lends itself to spaces now, not just figures. This is always been something I have been interested in--the spaces people make. A phrase that has popped into my head countless times in the last year. Of course I mean both the spaces in your mind, and the spaces in a physical environment. When I look at my pictures, I see a lot of meaning. I see a lot of symbolism and metaphor. How they all work together, I am not sure yet. I am still interested in the theme of puppetry, of control. My puppets have become more morbid and dark as I have worked with them. It's almost as if the pictures I made before, with the palette cut-outs, were a mask for what I truly wanted to paint. I remember someone saying last semester in crit, "Your pictures are too nice."It was very true, so much that it bothered me, and made me realize that it really isn't what I wanted to be doing. Those elements of my painting experience were definitely necessary to where I have landed presently, but I am glad to have moved on from that. 

In my current painting, I am dealing with architecture. Heavily influenced by Matthias Weischer, I am creating hybrid rooms. I think this new content developed from my hybrid figures, because I was yearning for a place to put them. No only that, but a room in itself can be a very personal thing. It can encompass a lot of memories, and can be indicative of a certain experience. As a painter, I can force the viewer INTO an experience. Into my experience of a hybrid, alternate reality.