User Since: 2011
My Bio
I am an art student from Austin, Texas who is currently studying Painting and Drawing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In the future, I plan on earning my MFA in order to teach and advance my professional practice. As an artist, I aspire to find truth and meaning through how I perceive and reconstruct the world around me. I invite you to join me as I continue to grow from one artwork to the next.
About My Work
I am a painter who uses the physicality of media to create dialectical expressions within geometric structures. I employ geometry to conceptualize quantity of form and organize harmonized contrasts within layers that obscure and complicate these forms. My vision is to integrate geometry into the relationship between order and chaos to show balance in an ever-changing world. I want my viewer to experience recognition, confusion, design and chance to decipher space, yet be overwhelmed by flatness.
Aesthetically, my work falls between abstraction and representation, exploring painting, drawing, printmaking, live art and performance. My primary interests are abstracting landscape and representing myself through portraiture, as both are immediate to my experience. The breadth of my work includes deconstructed landscapes, emotive self-portraiture, multiples, time-based abstraction and bodily movements within spaces.
To achieve these aesthetics, I combine unconventional materials and techniques to activate unique textural qualities that emphasize the viewer’s bodily relation to the work and enhance its overall sense of movement. Carving and sanding on wood panel, applying polyurethane, plaster, quartz powder and living material (such as grass) are all a part of creating physicality and contrast within the painting process. The geometry behind my work was inspired by Fibonacci sequences, Euclidian geometry, mazes, linear perspective, gestalt theory, Joseph Albers’s color theory and Zen concepts of the solid and void. Some of my underlying themes relating to order and chaos include looking at complexity via self-similarity (the concept that the whole has the same shape as one or more of the parts), impermanent relationships and blurring the line of authority.
The Tabula Rasa Series was inspired by the frequent ecological contrasts that I observed within Ireland’s Burren landscape. Turbulent weather transitions of rain, wind, hail and mist perpetuated the mystery of immense stone hills, vast green pastures and churning seas. Using the golden rectangle as a compositional structure allowed me to capture this fleeting experience in the language of paint. The rectangle’s self-similarity provided a way to divide space into infinite proportions. This relates a variety of contrasting aesthetic quantities to a whole. The interplay of polarities within the paint works to create a sense of unexpected balance – complimentary colors, wild and conservative strokes, organic and geometric shapes, rugged and shiny textures all layer together in a topography of organized chaos.
In the future, I plan to continue my investigation into the relationship between the balance of order and chaos, geometric structure and material application. My next projects will continue to integrate geometric structures further into the process and concept of the work. I see great potential in performance and live art to inform painting by incorporating time and movement based variables.
