My art is about the human spirit. I depict the human spirit in my art by using a visual language of abstract faces, forms, lines, shapes and symbols, made with paint, pencil, charcoal, pen, marker, paper, canvas, wood, glue and photography. On occasion, I work digitally with a tablet. I print these out, enhance them with traditional materials, and then use them in larger works. There is always at least one human spirit in my work. Some of the human spirits are from our ancient past. Some live in our time. Some live in an evolved human future we may not live to see.
I sometimes create my human spirits with collage. I shape the collage elements to look like abstract human faces and forms and then draw and paint on and around them, with lines, shapes, and symbols that represent to me the universe, and an eternal spirit far greater than ours.
However I create my spirits in my drawings, paintings or mixed media works, they always exist, in my mind, in an environment of some kind. They might exist in our world, a past world, a future world, or in another dimension. Even if I paint or draw a single human spirit on an otherwise blank piece of paper, I always imagine these lone spirits living in a particular time and place. Perhaps they are somewhere out in space, in some future time in which humanity has evolved further. I imagine them moving forward in space and time, trying to connect to some greater cosmic spirit, so they can learn from the greater spirit, evolve even further, and find humanity’s purpose and destiny in the universe.
I sometimes use photography in my work. I trim pieces of photographs and collage them into my abstract art; or I use a single full photograph onto which I collage shaped, human spirits made from paper, canvas or a fragment of a newspaper or book. I also draw abstract imagery that represents the human spirit onto full sized photographs. When I add drawn or collaged human spirits to my full sized photographs, the photographs become, for me, an entirely new world from the world depicted in the original photograph. The photograph becomes a surreal alternate world which seems to contain an underlying mystery and power beyond our comprehension; or perhaps the photograph has become a spiritually evolved world of the future in which we have reached the next stage of our evolution and view the world and universe differently.
When I use small pieces of my photographs in my abstract paintings, drawings, collages and three dimensional works, the photographs serve as a reference to the world we live in. The photographs ground the work in our world, while the abstract elements in these works combine with the pieces of photographs to give the sense of an entirely new dimension being revealed, one that looks like our world but is not.
Whatever world, universe or dimension I am imagining in my art, human spirits are always there. They may be depicted with abstract faces or forms. Or with a photograph of a human being. Or a piece of a photograph of a human being. Even in works with no abstract face or form or photograph, there is always at least one abstract human spirit in all my work (even if it is not an obvious spirit, and is purely abstract).
I believe the human spirit is now at risk of being broken forever, due to technology and artificial intelligence, which are rapidly diminishing the importance of human beings and the human spirit. For this reason, I will continue to focus on the human spirit in my art, and try to imagine, with my art, a future time in which the human spirit has survived our time, and has evolved much further.