Sculptural Paintings
I began creating these pieces because I had been previously painting with very thick paint (which is very expensive). So I acquired a ton of stiffened felt from a children's summer program I taught. I figured I could build up pieces of the stiffened felt – instead of paint – to create highs and lows on the canvas. Little did I know that it would become much more than that.
These paintings became a means for me to express my intense obsession with layers. Layers of the world, architecture, emotions, connections between people. My mind is always racing to connect these layers.
Here is an example: I sit thinking about all my shit, listening to my iPod, to some other artists crazy emotional shit, in a subway surrounded by 70 other people that I will never know or speak to or even look at, who are all also thinking and feeling and reacting and trying to find happiness. This subway is under the earth, under dirt and wires, pipes and years of workers digging and re-digging and pavement being poured to create the road that millions of people will drive over in one given day. Beside the street are sidewalks with more people walking, thinking being self-important. They are strolling alongside buildings made of brick and drywall and wires and pipes made from materials from all over the world. This is one block in a city with hundreds of blocks with towering buildings rising higher than some mountains into the sky, clouds passing by, and people in planes peering down. It's endless, the complexity of the world we live in. And yet there is little me, sitting on a stalled subway doodling in my journal.
So these paintings are about the different concentrations of layers. Some of them focus on physical aspect of the world, others on emotional. You'll find many struggles portrayed in them too; human vs. human, human vs. nature, human vs. self and human vs. god.
