This is my “artist’s statement”:
My passion for creating art is miniscule compared to my passion for people that I love. I think this is how it is for most people. Therefore I make art that focuses on the people that I care about and conveys the sense of happiness and fun, comfort and contentment that my friends and loved ones bring to me. Imbedded in the snapshot-style tile portraits there is a bittersweet sense of lost past and beloved memory. A most beautiful time in your life that you will never be able to return to, it is at once happy and sad. But I hope that the portraits inspire, and leave you feeling as warm as the earthy reds that they are painted from. My work is meant to convey the same sense of happiness and satisfaction that I received from creating it. If it can do that, my goal has been met.
I feel that it is okay. I like my “thesis statement” better:
Historically, my art has always been limited and guided by assignment. I have long been looking forward to my senior year as an undergraduate because of the freedom of choice I would have concerning my projects. It might be hard to grasp (it has been hard even for myself to come to terms with) that I do not have a goal for my art besides creating it. I want to make art. I want to paint a painting that looks like something. I enjoy the satisfaction of creation more than the thing I have created. As an artist, I don’t have anything to say and I don’t have any sort of social-commentary-type agenda. I am a happy person and I am very satisfied with almost everything. I don’t have a burning soul or an unreachable desire for wealth or fame or mountainous talent or mass-production or anything. I don’t feel cheated or misunderstood or mysterious. I know that I’m not.
I’m just a person who enjoys creating.
For my senior year, I want to make things that I enjoy, things that make me happy. I have chosen to paint portraits in terra sigillata on terra cotta tiles. I have learned skills at mold-making from George Timock and skills at tile-making and sigillata/glaze recipes from Tom Binger. I have learned the value of craftsmanship over the years and I plan on making neatly-crafted tiles and clay frames. I am using terra sigillatas to paint because of the color palette and the quality of the satiny surface. The images I am illustrating are personal images of happy, loved people in settings that become them. I am attracted to dramatic, flat negative space in conjunction with detailed focus.
I am painting on terra cotta tiles with terra sigillatas and NOT painting on canvases with paints because I enjoy the weight, lasting quality, and touchable texture of clay. It is generally frowned upon when you touch paintings, but clay is not like that. It welcomes the touch and withstands it. Clay asks to be touched and I encourage that personal relationship with art. Terra cotta clay specifically has a touchable ruggedness to it that porcelain does not. Sigillatas are easier to know than glassy glazes; sigillatas are smooth, but they do not create barriers.
Technically, I enjoy the work of Chuck Close. It is recognizable, highly detailed, obviously skilled, and it really looks like somebody, with all the nose hairs and greasy spots and wrinkles and everything. I have imagined those people in those portraits living their lives; they are very personable. Chuck Close does portraiture and I like that about him. However, I don’t know much about him. I like to know about people, not just about what they produce. Some well-known figures who influence me also include Joseph Campbell. I read The Power of Myth at a time in my life when I really needed a voice of even-keeled reason concerning religion, learning, friendship, love and happiness. I believe that Joseph Campbell was the one who taught me that it’s actually very good and very easy to be happy. “Follow your bliss.” I also found a lot of friendship in Douglas Adams and the misadventures in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Those metaphors of the ridiculousness of living in the world today and how hilarious it all really is helped to keep me light-hearted and happy. That is something that is very important to me; being happy.
I need to come to terms with my tendency to give people what I think they want and start doing the things that are really important to me. Especially when it comes to art, and especially at this point in my education. If, now, I do not make a decision about the art that I want to create, I’m afraid I will have spent six years learning how to let people tell me what to do. It is important for me, in my last year as a student, to practice what I have been taught to the best of my abilities, in the way that satisfies me the most.
