Scraped

What’s in your backyard? These works are made in multiple techniques – by drawing, slathering, scraping, sanding, adding and reducing.

I’m working in an anti-AI way, so that ‘backyard’ can mean anything or everything. Like, back of your mind? Where stuff is stored in the winter, and comes alive later on?

Always thinking about climate change and the giant contradiction involved when depicting optimism.

Through technical and pictorial contradictions, “Perilous Journey” paintings invoke the tensions that are analogous to our attempts to live placid normal lives, through circumstances that should call us to urgent action.

I am recently interested in a concept called “hypernormalization,” the acceptance of a simplified or distorted version of reality, or the belief that a broken system is normal. The term was coined by Russian historian Alexei Yurchak to describe the final days of the Soviet Union.

Largely abstract and heavily scraped, this collection is particularly “anti-AI” due to the extensive layering and textured surfaces. AI is pretty good at realistic imagery, but not great at abstraction, especially when an abstract painting’s rendition is physically dramatic.