![Is [Is]](paintings/paintings_2021/is_is.jpg)
Contact
For prices, questions or to schedule a studio visit : email me at paintings@modino.com
Biography
“The author has chosen the messages carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
About the Artist
In painting, I attempt to express experiences and influences, collapsed and removed from any time and place. The works combine references to the stillness and serenity of nature, suburban banality and hours in front of color-saturated cartoons, the energy of the urban environment – graffitied and distressed, to Florida Holiday Inns with muted colored carpets and pop art flower motif bedspreads These experiences along with the bombardment of “information” in our daily lives, are unconsciously coalesced, filtered and coded through a variety of new and organic shapes that combine with the abstracted paintings.
Growing up in Ohio in the 1970s, I felt as out of place as the Asian art in our house that my father brought back from the Korean war. By the early 80s, I arrived in New York City, and found an apartment on the Lower East Side. I was astonished at the decadent and creative life, and threw myself into it, showing at the downtown galleries and DIY art shows in abandoned buildings, performing with bands in underground clubs, and being part of a vibrant scene where artists, musicians, poets and performers all collided in ways that impacted all our work. It was about making art more than making money, and my ideas about art were dramatically influenced by this era. To pay rent, I worked as a carpenter and painted on the plywood I could get for free. I never liked painting on canvas; I didn’t like the texture or the artistic baggage. I used house paint because it was cheaper than artists paint. I appreciated what that inferred, but I also liked the way they looked. Re-using and re-treating the plywood by sanding off the paint, felt connected with the distressed wood signs and layered graffiti revealing the city’s life.
By the early 1990s, I discovered computer graphics. I loved the possibilities of the media and brought it into my artwork, as well as I founding a graphic design company with a friend that specialized in motion graphics, video, animation and web design. I later combined my digital art with found imagery on the street, along with modernist and other influences from growing up.
The work that I’m creating now continues to reference use these visual memories and spatial anomalies; combining image layering techniques from digital art with craft processes for the smooth finished surfaces with an illusion of depth, and in essence creating paintings within paintings.