Being my most recent period, it is hard to sum this work up with any sort of hind sight. The work here can best be catagorized as extending most of the themes I was working on before the band took me away for awhile. Much of the work seems to be highly conceptual in nature. I have also been trying to loosen up my brushwork, bringing action painting into the realm of surrealism. The works are few and far between, but I think the overall quality is my best yet.
Most of my art work done during this period related to my band. There was a constant need for art on flyers, tape covers, advertisements, backdrops, drum heads, and so on. Much of my art output also took the form of writing, arranging, and performing songs. For more information on this period, visit The VIEW Archive.
I spent several years in the cultural backwater of Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Being virtually without outside stimulus, I had plenty of time to work feverishly in my studio to analyze the art history I had learned in art college and filter it though my engineer-trained analytic side. At this point, I worked little from outside sources and found experimentation to be my prime motivator.
After taking some time off after art school, I returned to painting determined to make my art do everything it hadn't been allowed to during school. I wanted to make my art free of the marketplace and answerable only to my artistic muse. By this point, I was learning engineering in college, and the analytic skills I was learning come into play in my art at this stage. More abstraction and experimentation creep in, and even works based on literary sources are much looser in interpretation.
Art school almost killed me, metaphorically speaking. My greatest attraction to art has always been its freedom, but art school was about honing your work into a commodity. I bristled as I was forced to do a great many projects that I found redundant or lacking in any sense of personal growth. In high school, I had been encouraged to run with the ball; here I was encouraged to play by the rules.
I signed up for a class in oil painting my senior year, and this finally let me obtain complete control over the images I wanted to present. Although many of these are technically unpolished, I think the basic compositions and imagery are quite highly developed for a high school kid.
The earliest works here stem from my high school years when I was first beginning to understand I could use art as a means of self expression. Most of these projects are class assignments or just things I did in my spare time, but they all try to express something about me, and are therefore artistic in nature.