Prelude to the Obligatory Artist Statement

"To talk about painting is not only difficult but, perhaps pointless too.

You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing.

Painting has nothing to do with that.

Painting is a language itself."

"What interests me in general and this also applies to painting, are things I don't understand.

It's like that with every movie, I don't like the ones I understand."

-Gerhard Richter

Self-Portrait, Three Times

To paraphaze Gerhard Richter... take your artist statement and shove it up your ass! It infuriates me how every gallery, museum, self-proclaimed intellectual member of the art community and the casual observer requires me to provide a written artist statement in addition to my three dimensional creations. Is the viewer too lazy or perhaps too impatient to spend an extended amount time with a piece of art? It's not a television commercial, it's a piece of art, try spending more than 30 seconds looking at it. Try using your brain! Just because it does not immediately give you an answer, that does not mean the answer is not there. Perhaps the viewer is too uneducated to formulate their own opinion in regards to what they see, so by all means, allow me to rearticulatalte in words what I've already communicated with the use of line, shape, form, space, color, texture, pattern, movement, scale and balance.

Maybe I am the asshole. Maybe it is my fault for not dumbing down my creations in order for other people to understand. Wait, I understand now, the viewer wants me to further contextualise my art so they can appreciate it more, so they can gain a deeper understanding of my art and in turn, a deeper understanding of me, the artist. Well here is a crazy idea, pull your head out of your ass, look at the artwork and determine for yourself what it means to you. Do I really have to spoon feed the viewer every idea that goes through my head as I create my work? I do not want the viewer to know eveything. I want to leave my creations open ended so that evey viewer has a different interperation based on their life experiences. I want you, the viewer, to determine what my artwork is about. I want you to determine how it makes you feel but, apparently that is wrong. Figure it out for yourself. I do not want to write about my artwork. I would rather spend my time making it.