Trying To Be A Tree: A Retrospective
"The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim" -Oscar Wilde, in the Preface to The Compete Works of Oscar Wilde I have chosen to interrogate, out of temperament and out of necessity, to interrogate Saint Wilde's bold claim during the decade and a half that I have making and showing and selling artwork. See, what interests me about art is it’s entanglement with life: not imitation, but intimation. The process is all. I studied contemporary art practice at UC Santa Cruz from 2003-2005, and the faculty at that time were heavily influenced by the zeitgeist of post-conceptualism and, as a branch of the San Francisco Bay Area artistic community, art centered around "identity politics". As a young painter interested in formal technical competence and finding my place in the classical cannon of Western Art History, the teaching that I received thoroughly disrupted my trajectory at the time and forced m...