Artist Statement
I have seldom reflected on my artistic background. I was doing art as far back as grade school, getting awards, and later I was selling pastels to classmates in 9th grade. I am the only artist, or more specifically painter, in my family. I did not attend or graduate from any kind of art school or department in a college. To claim that I am a self taught artist is somewhat deceptive, as though to imply that my artistic endeavors arose in a cultural vacuum divorced from the history and lessons of modern art. And that has certainly not been the case. I have taken inspirational, artistic mental notes while thumbing through numerous art books in bookstores, before returning them to their respective shelves. The art that I’ve seen in contemporary galleries done by relatively unknown artists living today has helped to expand my artistic ideas and ways of expression, as much as what has come before. Early on certain artists inspired me, or at least they fascinated me: Bosch, Dali, Escher, Max Ernst, Mark Tobey, VanGogh, Rousseau and many others. Without these artists who have come before me I could not be doing what I do now. They lit torches, opened paths and made valid numerous means of expression. Surrealism opened doors for me and abstraction intrigued me.
Later I came to feel a kinship with folk art, such as the visionary art of Australia’s first people or from the American Indians. I expanded the meaning of folk art to include petroglyphs, cave paintings, even the urban art unexpectedly found in an alleyway or cartoon characters painted on a fence. I came to think of folk art as a kind of indigenous art that could even include the automatic writing of Surrealism, as a process not beholden to the formalist rules and trends in art rendered as history, commodity and investment. Folk art represented for me much more than roosters and crucifixes. It stood, like a torn flag, in a vast asphalt wasteland, for expression borne from each one’s participation in that mysterious river of creation, no matter how shallow or deep the water. It stood for the celebration of the everyday, the strange and quirky, the sublime and beautiful. It stood in acknowledgment of giving witness to the tragedy and joy of our journey, to terrible emptiness or terrible beauty, to feeling lost or at peace; or, for the experience of that crazy, all consuming Escher like dance of angels and demons. It was about speaking a truth, not as dogma, but as one might dream of being a star or a tree in another life. It was about feeling the texture of poetry in the celestial chorus of grass and cloud. It was about praying, when in great need, to the Virgin of Guadalupe, to pray for life and feeling. I came to see folk art, per my definition, as an expression broadly defined to include surrealism and abstract art as these artistic genres, like geniis greater in stature than any individual artist, embraced the passion and spirit of folk art that was itself a jinn of place, communal space and states of mind. Into this embrace I had taken my creative journey, beginning with self expression and leaving self behind.
