The College Years (2010-14)

Senior Thesis Artist Statement 

I was taught at a young age to never tell a lie, and “if you didn’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” For an observant and cynical child raised in the conservative, polite South, that doesn’t leave you much to talk about. Art, and specifically painting, became an elaborately veiled outlet to express myself. These paintings can shout my thoughts and feelings without saying exactly what I think and feel. 

Life is experienced in community, and to a reserved introvert, that is often overwhelming. I try to keep the world and people safely at arm’s length, an observable distance from which I can interpret and understand the complex and chaotic relationships around me. Life is messy, people are complicated, and I like to build paintings around those interactions. I primarily draw inspiration from friends and family, people with whom I have a close personal connection, and filter our relationship through art history or mythological narratives. From there I layer in religious, cultural, and personal symbolism to construct complex, often ironic and cynical, visual narratives. 

I feel a strong need to include figures in my paintings as a point of entry. They become a gateway through which I empathize with the work and maintain the motivation to see a piece through to completion. In the same way, it is important that my paintings are visually seductive, and I've found that figuration and a semblance of realism are effective ways to draw in an audience. The narrative systems in my paintings are composed of many layers of personal symbolism, and, beyond the initial interpretation, they can become very esoteric. Thus, I see the paintings as a kind of visual Trojan horse, sneaking my thoughts into your mind and home.

My Senior Exit work has been an examination of construction and the personal relationships I have cultivated while at The University of Georgia. One can examine the process of making a painting and break it down into desecrate steps, which can then be analyzed and broken down into smaller increments. Each increment can be categorized and systematized to to improve efficiency in the making and consistency of the finished product. My obsessive mind loves to make painting as mechanical as possible, and to an extent, it is profitable. As I described earlier, art is a way to impose order on the chaos around me. But paint is inherently chaotic and the process of making a painting is as much an act of destruction as creation. The white rectangle was the most ordered a piece would ever be, but for some reason the chaos of an image held more allure. It is probably best when the imposed order of an image and physicality of the material rest in balanced conflict. You never complete a painting, you just get close enough that your subconscious lets you stop working on it. I like to call it perfecting the “imperfectible.” I think we all go through a very similar process. It’s easiest to see the delineated steps in education, but we undergo a process of “perfecting” in every area of our lives, in pursuit of both our ideal self and circumstances. For the figures in these pieces, their cars become an indexical sign for their place in both processes.