They were little documented horrors and loves that I collected that expressed who I was or what I was interested in at a time in my life. When I look back through my hundreds of drawings and paintings, I can see a maturing spirit trying to find a voice through all the chaos, attempting to coalesce, or at least navigate between the perils of a various existence amongst a larger community. It wasn’t until I found the Cassowary that I began to find a theme and expression that could speak more broadly to an audience beyond myself.
The Cassowary introduced me to the carnivorous beauty of the bird world and became a symbol of beauty, fierce ugliness, and the boldness of the human spirit. I wanted to connect to the audience by showing the world through the transformation between bird and man and exploring the symmetries in symbolisms therein. Looking back on my life and tracing what birds mean to me I can see a path from the story of the blue bird of happiness my grandmother told me, to the use of birds and animal heads in Egyptian art, to the book the Painted Bird written by Jerzy Kosinski who writes of the persecution of the individual amongst the flock. This symbolic path of the bird was something I could see shared with others. The Bird has been a symbol of everything from freedom to horror. The bird has so many meanings to so many people that it leaves an open-ended imaginary place for the viewer to connect their ideas.
I use movement in my artwork because it helps emphasize the stillness of a moment. The freezing of objects in space or the blurring effects of motion remind me of how quickly life appears to move around us, as from our own internal perspective, we feel as if we are
standing still. We live in a digital age of fast pictures, fast memes, fast text messages, and our connection to each other and the world is spat out through this grinder of attention deficit media. Using oil and acrylic paint allows me to share an artistic moment with the viewer asking them to make their own story, or question what beauty is, or how we treat each other. The medium is slow and nostalgic of time.
Each one of my paintings starts with a playlist inspired by the mix tapes I used to make as a teen growing up in the 90’s. Each tape has a theme, or mood that connects the songs together and a title I create that is a word salad of this theme. Each of my bird paintings is named after the mixtape I created as the inspiration for my painting.
Talking about my artwork has always been hard for me because I choose to work in the language of pictures. Pictures and colors and space speak in multidimensions and meaning. To attempt to clarify seems to leave so much out. As an artist you are often asked what kind of work you do with the expectation of describing it in a few sentences.