VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I believe art can offer a revelatory transformation of difficult subject matter, a subtlety and insight into otherwise hopeless situations. Years ago, I was hospitalized for a severe viral infection. The doctors were baffled, not able to agree on a diagnosis. I was hooked me up to machines and told that I may not survive.

Making paintings depicting patients on Life-support systems eventually became the primary theme for me. Many of my family members and friends began passing away within a short period. My story continues to unfold with the recent tragedy of very close family-friends, a husband and wife, dying in a horrific auto accident. Eventually, everyone experiences the loss of loved ones and we’re all just trying to make sense of things.

Painting has this persistent ability to absorb the culture around it and kind of spit it out in a way that causes self-reflection. So painting is a vulnerable way to face my own struggles, Art for me, is an endeavor to examine near-death experiences as an interpretive framework for how we derive meaning from life.

Watercolor is a type of paint you can control only to a degree. And the situational adversity depicted in the paintings most often arises from circumstances outside the patient’s control. When I first began to experience the dying of those close to me, I was a practitioner of the Japanese martial-system known as Aikido. It was originally designed for samurai who lost their weapon in battle and were forced to maintain a calm response to the adversity of armed aggression by redirecting it. The poignancy in watercolor comes about through redirecting and guiding the stains – a medium that conveys an inherent fragility through its unsubstantial surface and tendency to fade away.

The deeper and more concrete metaphoric is the actual process of making. The entire enterprise of the artist is a metaphor in its function, and its structure, that is: to produce an authentically rich experience, and the process it takes to achieve it.

Using the small watercolors as preliminary works for much larger paintings, places myself a bit outside the experience. When painting large, I’m in it and the painting demands more of me. step in my process is straightforward at first, beginning with a projection of the small watercolor as a map of the original marks. The concept of projection is heavily dependent on associations – the way our minds work, orientated toward the future, and the metaphor of understanding ourselves through the otherness of other human beings. When reconstructing the coordinates of a small watercolor to a large scale the result is a reduction in the distance between the viewer and the imagery. I adopt what you might call the cinematic close-up as a tool for temporarily suspending cognition. It’s really about aligning the psychology of the image with being keenly aware of your mortality.

I do not consider the large paintings as reproductions; each one becomes an entirely new problem to work through. Once I finish that initial layer of paint after projection, I abandon any kind of mechanical approach for something completely different. The individual nonsensical marks of the watercolor become continents of information to unpack and my goal is then to imbue those marks with even more autonomy while somehow retaining the integrity of the overall image.

The pandemic was certainly new to all of us. A decade into making these paintings, my process had to change because I could no longer visit patients in-person, so I began to enlist a network of assistants including physicians and covid-nurses. While some covid-patients were seeing alien-like hazmat suits. And for their loved ones it was like their family members were dying in a war in some distant battlefield, not able to be with them. By transforming the ugliness of these situations into an aesthetic experience, the paintings prompt clarifying questions.

Framing this process as an analogy for connecting how we do something, to how we see, and therefore how we interact and live in the world, is vital. For me the apparent brevity in watercolor application is analogous to our tendency to forget pain so quickly. I’m using oil paint in the large paintings to solidify those faint memories as moments to confront and be present in.

I have come to realize urgency of process is significant because it results in an urgency of the image. This is compounded by the fact that life seems so short and there are only a finite number of hours.

In the laborious task of producing a painting, there is a growing sympathy towards what each image embodies. As artists, we utilize other people’s afflictions combined with our own, as raw material. My goal is that through the investment of time, the process of contemplating, and the act of painting, the result is redemptive.