Art in the Library--August

The Napa Library hosts my solo show from July 26th until the end of August. My artist’s talk on Friday, August 14th at 6:30pm will cover two areas and pull in biographical and archival work along the way: The Realist Trap and Why You Could Just Buy a Photo, and Good Art Versus Great Art: Impressing Versus Inspiring Others to Create. My current work is driven by a key question: can Platonic ideals be made manifest in ink and acrylic on canvas? The rest is by turns pretty interesting, trippy, and weird visual speculation. The resulting “color-blocking” is a mischievous way to see the world, allowing a washing away of grim realities into a purer, more inherently positive realm. It’s an arrangement of return to childhood’s wisdom: delight in imagery itself. Equally, the repurposing of mediums intended for mass production–metallic inks and acrylic paints–into singular hand-drawn or -painted pieces gives me and brings to others joy, for metallics zing with a life force not found elsewhere in other mediums.

As such, these are primal works focusing on vision, order, and patterning, the metallics creating a deliberate shimmering effect, necessitating multiple viewpoints to appreciate fully and requiring an active participation in the art’s presencing, which is why my most abstract of forms come alive on the canvas, imbued with an incomparable, unique energy.  I am thus attempting to re-orient what “wine country” art can and should be. Rather than tourist-driven imagery, I bring more formal approaches to the surroundings and equally allow them to inspire him in ways both direct and indirect. Optical Art is participatory–the viewer must contribute, and does so individually and idiosyncratically–in order for the pieces to function anywhere close to the creators’ intentions. That looseness constrained by interaction is the interesting space I am exploring and hoping to showcase.