ABOUT
Artist | Space Wizard
ME: I am an artist/full-time dad based out of Toronto. However, every day that slash is the other way around, and I grasp at any free time to do art, commissions, learning, etc. I also feel extremely lucky to be a self-trained artist during this digital age with all the tools at our fingertips.
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MY ART: I am in search of doing something meaningful, challenging, and beautiful. I constantly explore old and new spaces to uncover something unique and show it in a different light. I tend to stand on the shoulders of giants, as I grow and expand my abilities.
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AN ASIDE: Oh, and I'm a generally happy guy, hence the smiling picture above. Sometimes I wish I was more brooding and awkward like a Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, or Jackson Pollock ... what a shame that my parents loved me.
ARTIST STATEMENT #1 | OIL PAINTING
Minimum yielding Maximum
My painting is a daunting ordeal that is a thrill to conceive and paint. This is because I take complex images and simplify them down to the bare minimum in both form and color.
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Each painting and illustration is a random assortment of shapes and squiggles that upon close inspection look no more like than blobs. Yet, painting these simplistic shapes is a complex task requiring precision and watchfulness. Bringing them together into a cohesive image that looks exactly as it should is the key.
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Unlike most modern art where the viewer needs to imagine those blobs and lines as an image, my shapes come together on the canvas or paper to form the intended image. Therefore, the viewer's imagination is not used to extrapolate the actual art, but instead is used to conjure up the real picture in their mind's eye. If the mental conjecture meets the tangible representation then next follows the emotions inherent with that mental image.
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That is the power that I love in art - the mental web that it triggers leading to varying images and emotions the viewer unconsciously experiences and then seeks to consciously put words to it. A meaningful painting will incite the memory of the viewer, and it will become more than a canvas on the wall with random blobs and lines, it will become a trigger for love or pain, joy or suffering, laughter or sadness...
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ARTIST STATEMENT #2 | ILLUSTRATIONS
Cross-hatching Freedom
My illustrations grew out of necessity. The ability to pick up a pencil or pen and draw anywhere at any time and stop at the drop of a hat was an important capability in the life of a stay-at-home parent.
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Being an avid fan of wood paneling from the renaissance as well as comic illustrations, I chose the tool of ink and the style of cross-hatching to create images. I thoroughly enjoy the fact that each line in ink is permanent and therefore needs to have meaning. Additionally, I find it fascinating that three dimensional things can be transformed into a two dimensional depictions using only lines. This is one of the reasons, why comic books appeal to me so much from an artistic point of view.
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I chose to draw ballerinas and faces. Ballerinas because their human poses and swaying clothes are challenging to draw and yield beautiful geometric shapes. Faces because the human face requires exact drawing, as just the slightest mistake will yield a portrait that does not look right.