Awareness of the Physical World

My work as a whole revolves around the importance of human sensuality and the awareness of the physical world above all things. When you take a single step, or rest your face on a pillow, or touch a cool, damp wall in a basement, you receive information in a way that cannot be expressed in quotidian language. The awareness of interacting with your environment in a purely physical way also seeps into the way you look at the world. You become more observant, more curious.

The Importance of Touch

However, the most important aspect of the human sensual experience is the interaction with other people. The most effective communication is touch. Touching someone, being touched, forms the most effective connection in our short period of mortality. The immediacy of contact creates a dynamic tension that I feel the need to explore. The body is a complex landscape, a map that reflects the person within. But the body is not simply a lantern with the candle of a soul flickering through the glass.

Consciousness and physicality are intrinsically inseparable, from replenishing your red blood cells of oxygen by breathing to emotions that cause sweating, shaking, crying, screaming. Without the physical sensation and without allowing yourself to fully process it, the consciousness is simply an abstract concept. It floats in the realm of a heaven or hell that may not exist.

Painting has addressed this subject matter for the entirety of known history. The cave paintings discovered in Lascaux, France, included handprints. The application of paint with your hands as a conceptual idea explores human physicality and its potential impact. Countless other works explored the relationship between consciousness and the body, such as by Michelangelo, Rodin, and so on.

Painting and Physicality

In my paintings I attempt to include this tension, this immediacy. In my portraits, the way the application of paint reflects a person physically embodies a central theme. The very nature of paint as a physical substance can parallel the sensual experience. Working with the paint alla prima creates a malleable image which I explore every time I apply the brush to the canvas. Working wet on wet is also a way to express the temporal nature of the sensual human experience. At some point, the paint will dry, the oil will eat away at the ground, the body will decay, and time will move forward. It’s a good thing.

Permanence and the Body

I also explored the concept of time and the exploration of what permanence means. If you’re viewing your body as the primary way to experience your life, then your skin maps the place or places where you live. You can permanently alter this fleshy map, purposefully with a tattoo, accidentally with a scar. But time is larger than the way that humans can perceive it. Time cannot be judged by whether you see the sun or not, whether you’re hungry or not, but the rate that a mountain sinks into the earth, or the stone cave floor absorbs water. A scar will eventually fade and a tattoo will disappear. The only choice is whether it happens between life or death. Every time you depict a human body, you depict mortality.

My work evolved from a concentration in traditional methods and philosophy, the importance of drawing and observational accuracy. My interest in art history also influences the subject matter, leading to a classical approach to imagery and symbolism that mixes with my own contemporary view. I am also influenced by my surroundings, leading to the integration of landscape and architectural detail drawn from life. The body of work that I have developed in the past year have all been combinations and reflections on my love for traditional method, my interest in history, and my contemporary outlook on the sensual human life experience.