ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Paintings

            I remember as an art student looking at a Tiepolo painting and noticing imprints of brush strokes beneath the surface that were not part of the final composition. These strokes represented something Tiepolo had painted over; a rejection of one passage or idea for another, a change of mind. By observing the history and dimensionality of marks left in the wake of the evolution of the painting I felt that I was there, watching Tiepolo at work.
             My recent abstract paintings are a kind of alchemy of controlled accidents, random play and unexpected relationships that acquire greater significance as the making and layering of the painting evolves. My work, in part, reflects a meditation on surface and relies increasingly on working with a multiplicity of mediums, including oil paints, shellac, metal patinas, incandescent powders and photographic emulsions & chemicals. As layers are built up, the earliest areas resonate from beneath and in some way tease the surface of the finished work. In this sense, surface becomes an archeological record and a topography, a memoir of the making of the painting and competes in importance with the image, expanding perception.
          Through small points of pigment applied in layers over disorderly surfaces, these paintings map ambiguous relationships of clusters and patterns - semaphores from of a hermetic world without objects or comfortable references.

Photography

                I am attracted to alternative ways in which cameras see the world. I was trained as a painter and printmaker. I was asked to teach photography at my school in 1986. I had never previously been in a darkroom but after a year or so of teaching the course, my fascination with photographic possibilities prompted me to give up printmaking for photography. I built my first pinhole cameras about two years later when all my camera equipment was stolen.
                 I modify the tonality and surface of my black & white photographs with bleaches, fixer, toners and emulsions as well as exposing them to light at inappropriate times. I am one of many artists who find it a challenge to explore the alchemy of melding dissimilar media, hoping to create a rich kaleidoscopic surface that is as seductive as the image and hints at an ambiguous time of origin
                 Having lived and photographed in urban environments most of my life, I have witnessed time and again the sustained birth and decay of cultures and place, the constant flux of cities. Many of the places I have photographed over time have been altered. These places could have declined or they could have been completely replaced with something new.  I like to think of my photographs as visual memories, existing in a parallel world.

Pinhole Photography

                I am attracted to alternative ways in which cameras see the world. I was trained as a painter and printmaker. I was asked to teach photography at my school in 1986. I had never previously been in a darkroom but after a year or so of teaching the course, my fascination with photographic possibilities prompted me to give up printmaking for photography. I built my first pinhole cameras about two years later when all my camera equipment was stolen.
                 I attempt to give a painterly quality to my photographs by modifying them with bleaches, fixer, toners and emulsions as well as exposing them to light at inappropriate times. I am one of many artists who find it a challenge to explore the alchemy of melding dissimilar media, hoping to create a rich kaleidoscopic surface that is as seductive as the image.
                 The largest body of my work consists of pinhole cityscapes; an ongoing series I call "The Bent Cities Project". Having lived and photographed in urban environments most of my life, I have witnessed the constant flux of cities - the sustained birth and decay of urban spaces.  I have photographed these places many times over the years where at times they have become altered, have declined or have been completely replaced with something new. I mimic this urban change by curving, twisting or angling the negatives in my pinhole cameras to create "bent" cityscapes of an indeterminate time. I want these images to look as if they have become luminous wrecks of a dubious age, leaving surface time maps chronicling the signs and blemishes of extended use - images tainted by humans, the sun, weather and the seasons.

 

email: rustart@aol.com
            http://www.commschool.org/